I have a new 1 TB drive coming in tomorrow. What is the best way to divide this space for a development workstation?
The biggest problem I think I'm going to have is that some partitions (probably /usr) will become to small after a bit of use. Other partitions are probably to huge. The swap drive for example is currently 2GB (2x 1GB RAM), but it is almost never used (only once that I know of).
If you partition your drive using LVM you won't have to worry about any individual partition running out of space in the future. Just move space around as necessary.
If you want a classic setup, I'd go for a 50GB "/" partition, for all your application goodness, and split the rest across users, or a full 950GB for a single user. Endless diskspace galore!
My standard strategy for normal "utility" boxes is to give them a swap partition twice the size of their RAM, a 1GB /boot partition and leave the rest as one vast partition. Whilst I see why some people want a separate /var, separate /home, etc., if I only have trusted users and I'm not running some production service, I don't think the reasons I've heard to date apply. Instead, I do my best to avoid any resizing, or any partition becoming too small - which is best achieved with one huge partition.
As for the size of swap and /boot - if your machine has 4GB memory, you may not want to have double that in swap. It's nonetheless wise to at least have some. Even if you nonetheless have double, you're using a total of 9GB, for 0.9% of your new drive. /boot can be smaller than 1GB, this is just my standard "will not become full, ever" size.
Please tell me what are you doing to /boot that you need more than 64MB on it? Unless you never intend to clean it, anything more is a waste of space. Kernel image + initrd + System.map won't take more than 10MB (probably less - mine weight 5MB) and you really don't need to keep more than two spares.
And with the current prices of RAM - if you are needing swap, you'll be much better off buying more memory. Reserve 1GB for swap and have something monitoring it's usage (no swap at all is bad idea because the machine might lock up when it runs out of free memory).
@wvdschel:
Don't create separate partitions for each user. Unused space on each partition is wasted.
Instead create one partition for all users. Use quota if necessary to limit each user's space. It's much more flexible than partitioning or LVM.
OTOH, one huge partition is usually a bit slower, depending on the file system.
Did you know 1TB can easily take up to half an hour to fsck? Workstations usually crash and reboot more often than servers, so that can get quite annoying. Do you really need all that space?
I would go with a 1 GB for /boot, 100 GB for /, and the rest for /home. 1 GB is probably too high for /boot, but it's not like you'll miss it. 100 GB might seem like a lot for everything outside home, until you start messing around with Databases and realize that MySQL keeps databases in /var. Best to leave some room to grow in that area. The reason that I recommend using a separtate partition for /home, is that when you want to completely switch distros, or if the upgrade option on your distro of choice, for whatever reason doesn't work, or if you just want to start from scratch and do a clean system install, you can just format / and /boot, and leave home with all the user data intact.
I would have two partitions. A small one (~20 GB) mounted on / would store all your programs, and then have a large one on /home. Many people have mentioned a partition for /boot but that is not really necessary. If you are worried about resizing, use LVM.
i give 40gb to / then how ever much ram i have i give the same to /swap then the rest to /home