Linux and more on a "small" hard drive (was Re: Linux on netbooks)

[david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org (David Kramer)]

Brendan Kidwell wrote:
 > Am I the only one perfectly happy on a 60GB hard drive?
> 
> I have been using a Thinkpad X41 Tablet and loving it, for years. It
> came with a 60GB disk, and I'm currently running Ubuntu on it in a
> SINGLE partition -- I don't see the point of dividing up such a small
> space when I can always just dump it to another device and restore if
> I really have a need to reformat it in the future. Inside my Ubuntu
> system I have a Windows XP virtual machine I use for connecting to the
> Cisco VPN at work (IT provides no support or clue as to any other way
> to connect to it other than 'you must run this Windows package and
> enter your username and current key fob key. That is all.')

I also don't set up lots of partitions on my laptop.  One for Windows,
one for Linux root, one for swap.

The main reason I have been using a real Windows partition to date was
my main use case for Windows was syncing my Windows Mobile phone, which
only worked through a USB cable, and I never got that working using a
VM.  Either USB didn't work at all, or USB worked but they sync software
refused to see the phone anyway.  I just bought an iPhone, and it seems
there are some syncing things that can only be done through the cable, too.

Like you, I use an external USB hard drive for big things like my music
backup (6000+ songs and still ripping CDs), which I don't need to walk
around with anyway.  But I do have development environments for several
languages and lots of extra Java stuff like Spring, Hibernate, Eclipse
(it's no coincidence that "Eclipse" and "Emacs" sound so much alike),
and those do take up a ton of space.  I also keep a few ISO images lying
around for burning distro CDs and DVDs, and I copy shows and movies from
my MythTV box for watching on the go (which I will now probably convert
to use on my iPhone instead).