For a short while I have a laptop I can play with. I must, however, put
it to work RSN.
It's had, in turn, Kubuntu Breezy, SuSE 10, Mandriva 2006.1.
As shipped, it had something like this:
hda1 Compaq(!) recovery partition 5 G or so
hda2 38G Windows XP Home (vfat32 and I mean very fat)
hda{3,4} Extended (dunno which)
hda5 Another very fat XP partition ("data").
K resized (very nicely) hda5 to give me space to install Linux.
Suse, I installed over U and that was fine too. I know S can resize NTFS
(I've done so) so I expect it would find very fat partitions a doddle.
Next I replaced S with M. M, I found, has a nice GUI which promises to
resize very fat partitions too (post-install in this case, the question
didn't arise earlier). I used it to trim hda2; it would only take 5 Gb
off it, presumably because there's a file in the way and it's not into
defragging.
I also pruned a little off windows D:.
The result was I had a couple of fragments of free space when I came to
try Fedora Core 4.
Note that all me efforts to install FC4 were in text mode.
Sadly, FC4 just could not cope with it. Autopartition using existing
Linux partitions failed because it couldn't do its create LVM thing
(sorry, I've no way of transporting stuff off this computer - no
floppies, no serial port and the DVD burner was in use) unless I do a
network install.
I tried manual partitioning, and choosing partitions by pressing "enter"
seemed to choose one to edit, but it wanted to create in cylinders (does
not work), when I chose "megabytes" it didn't tell me how many I could have.
I tried fdisk to create free space, but using free space doesn't work
either.
Meanwhile Linux has done to Windows what Windows is famous for doing to
Other Operating Systems: made it unbootable.
Eventuallly I manged to make one of the small bits into Linux Swap,
another into Linux Native and install FC4 into that. There's still a lot
of unused space:-(((
Since this was going into a small paritions I decided to omit X. I was
surprised deselecting X didn't also deselect Ghome and all the other
stuff that requires X.
I was also surprised I didn' get to examine individual package
selections: I wanted xen and could not see how to be sure I was getting it.
I wasn't, I didn't, I had to get it manually later.
In summary: FC4's disk partitioning is farqued.
Users doing a manual install of FC4 need more scope for package-selection.
Note: if any of the others had made such a botch of partitioning they'd
not have got installed. I'm not at all sure Anaconda's going let me
install into all that free space.
What I intend for this laptop is XP Professional (work licence) plus
Linux: the disk will be mostly wiped RSN.
If Jeremy or another Anaconda hacker has anything to ask, do so soon. I
don't need help to fight my way out of this.
Note: installing FC5 beta is possible (provided it's not going to be too
flakey).
--
Cheers
John
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