The only real drawback to using more partitions is that it is often
difficult to know in advance what your needs will be. If you make a
partition too small, either you will have to reinstall the system, or you
will be constantly moving things around to make room in the undersized
partition. On the other hand, if you make the partition too big, you may
be wasting space that could be used elsewhere.

Planning Use of the System

Disk space requirements and your partitioning scheme are influenced by the
type of installation you decide to create.

For your convenience, Debian offers a number of default ``profiles'' some
of which are listed later in this section. Profiles are simply preselected
sets of packages designed to provide certain desired capabilities on your
system. Installation is easier since packages that fit your desired
profile are automatically marked for installation. Each given profile
lists the size of the resulting system after installation is complete.
Even if you don't use these profiles, this discussion is important for
planning, since it will give you a sense of how large your partition or
partitions need to be. The following are some of the available profiles
and their sizes:

Server_std.
This is a small server profile, useful for a stripped-down server,
that does not have a lot of niceties for shell users. It basically
has an FTP server, a web server, DNS, NIS, and POP. It will take
up around 50MB. Of course, this is just the size of the software;
any data you serve would be additional.