Re: [aclug-L] New Installation

["Greg House" <ghouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dariush Zahedi wrote:


>Repeating my earlier message as no one has yet responded. Would appreciate
>a hand in this:


I saw a couple of messages that responded to your question. If you missed
them, you might check the mailing list archives at http://www.aclug.org

>QUOTE
>I have a Red Hat 5.1 which I want to install on my NT system. I have an
>unused partition D: of 3.1 GB which I can utilize for this. I've gone thru
>the guide but it is very confusing. Do I have to make seperate artitions
>for all the components or just two, for swap and the rest? In case of
>seperate partitions how should I divide the space? What you would have done
>based on your experience?

You need to have at least one partition for swap and one for root (/). I've
set a number of systems up this way and it works just fine. You can get
finer granularity, which can allow you to mount portions of the system
read-only (for protection) and to keep things from filling up your disk and
causing system hangs (like spool or log files). For example, someone running
a system that was a print server would probably create a seperate partition
for /var/spool.

A lot of people recommend at least 3 in addition to your swap partition.  /,
/usr, and /home. This gives you a lot of flexability. If I remember right, I
usually set up / at least 300-400MB, /usr 1GB or more, and /home as
whatever's left. Depending on what you use your system for, you can make
adjustments. As an example, I use a lot of installed applications and don't
create a lot of files of my own (I play a lot), so I set my /home up
smaller, like 200MB.

The largest swap partition Linux will use is 128MB, so don't bother making
one bigger then that. It'll use multiple swap partitions, but it's not
productive to put more then one on a single disk drive, so stick with a
single swapfile, at most 128MB. The rule of thumb I've used has been to make
the swapfile twice the size of the physical memory in the machine. So for a
32MB system, the swapfile would be 64MB.

I like using cfdisk to create the partitions. If you already have a
partition created by NT that you want to use for Linux, you'll need to
delete it and create new partitions of Linux native type in the space
created. Be very careful that you delete the correct one, because if you
remove one of your NT partitions, there's no way to get it back!

There's a Linux HOWTO (maybe a mini-HOWTO...) that describes how to set up
your boot loader to dual boot Linux & NT. Definitely consult that before you
load LILO, least you render one of them unbootable.

Hope this helps,
Greg