On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 07:58:27PM -0400, Jude DaShiell wrote: > Almost, the swap partition and the file fdisk can look at have me curious. > Is swap properly called /swap when keying in its name for these utilities Swap is not mounted anywhere in root file tree. the entry in /etc/fstab has it as /dev/sda8 swap swap defaults 0 0 for example. swapon is a tool to manipulate swap space. It's ususaly done during bootup but can be used later. swapon -s shows your current swap space/size. > or do you just key in swap and usr and / and have linux figure out the > rest? Does a way exist to have fdisk generate a file it can use later to fdisk has an item t in it's menu for type, i.e. that's partition type which is 82 for swap and 83 for ext2 partition types. You need to tell what partition type you want to create during the process. cfdisk and other tools are a bit more user friendly and do it for you with easier selection. Neither one is difficult if you know what you are doing. > reconstruct the partitions automatically? If not, where's the > documentation on how to make one of those files. Though for now I'm doing I would use sfdisk, a utility that can help you save current partition info to a file on a floppy disk for example. sfdisk -l /dev/hda > /mnt/floppy/partitions.hda man pages are the first step to try in any Unix system. Other possibilities are html and info files but they are not automagicaly accessible on all systems. > this system for home use and it will be doing ppp over a phone line for > outside communications This might lessen possibilities for future error. > For now some viruses can attack linux and I don't rule out having to > reinstall at some future time for that reason. Well, if you worry about "virus attack on linux" then no partitioning scheme will help if it's not write protected because the bad guy can wipe out everyting when become root. I suggest you install a firewall and set it up so that only you can initiate the connections to the outside world and not the other way around. Bastille is a good tool to setup a firewall automagically more or less on Redhat and Mandrake systems. > > Jude <jdashiel@shellworld.net> > ... old stuff deleted -- Rafael