In the how-to for installing Xubuntu & BOINC for a dedicated cruncher there is a fair amount of detail on partitioning the HDD (page 2).  The example drive used is a 10GB drive.  Much time has passed since that original how-to was written and posted here (and on the Guru-Mountain team site).  10GB HDDs are getting to be almost rare.  20GBs are considered practically throw away by many and it’s hard to buy a new drive under 80GB.  My most recent HDD aquisition was actually a lot of five 40GB 2.5″ (laptop) SATA drives.  This has become my ‘drive of choice’ for now.

Here’s a partial cut and paste of my post from Guru-Mountain on the partitioning topic:

2) ASSUMING min HDD size of 10GB… My experience with HDD partitioning indicates letting Ubuntu manage the space will cause you less long term grief. I no longer allocate /boot, /var or /temp but rather ONLY specify a primary partition for /swap (of 512MB to 1024MB), the “/” (root) partition (again another primary & around 8.5GB on a 10GB drive, 15GB on a 20GB drive) and finally another partition (logical or primary) for /home that is the remaining space on the drive. Besides not having issues with /boot filling up or /var/lib/boinc-client being too small there are some real advantages to using this layout should you later need to clone a partition over to another drive.

Jeff (the primary author with my help on the VNC portions) agrees that this ‘how-to’ is due for an update or overhaul to include some other partitioning options and some notes for other Linux variations.  So that’s on the ‘to-do’ list.