Hi All,

as far as I was told by a BOfH, the reason for splitting into /, /usr,
/tmp. /var and /home was that is quite handy : 

  - a small root means that you can mount it readonly by default thus
protecting all boot-stuff and the more basic commands in /bin and /sbin; 
also the /root could be in it. It can be remounted rw when needed... you
can allways get into your system. 

  - a /usr partition for easy upgrading your system. Just delete the
stuff. Note that /usr/local is a symbolic link to another partition in my
system and thus preserving precious selfmade stuff.

  - a seperate /tmp is handy since it is designed to be written when the
power goes down. i.e. in a big crash you can even put a new fs on it
without harm (or do it by default :-)) Also /var/tmp and a ?? /usr/tmp ??
can be put here by symbolic links.

  - a seperate /var or even a seperate /var/spool to avoid crashing the
system when you get real big mail-bombs or recieving a bit too much
news...

  - a seprate /home is sensible anyway... users can't crash the system by
completely flooding the harddisc. OK, quota's can be used, but that's not
allways desirable.

As you devide the stuff, fsck'ing gets faster, esp. when you mount stuff
ro. When I'm really developping stuff, it's quite handy if the computer
dies (kernel hacking) without sync'ing, my harddiscs are intact :-)... 
ofcource you can take the coward's/smartass way of doing stuff like that
and just mount everything over NFS :-)) 

Cheers,

Reinoud