Glenn Ervin staggered into view and mumbled: > > >I was just reading on a how-to page about getting ready for installing >Linux. >It mentions partitioning a hard drive, and I wanted to get some feed back on >whether any of you wish you had done it differently. >I have a second hard drive, which I intend on dedicating totally to Linux, >drive D, which is 8 GB in size. >>From what I read, it seems that I want at least 3 primary partitions. >Unless I am mistaken, I want one to be no more than 80 MB, and one no more >than 500 MB. >* Should I have 4 primary partitions? >P.S., I still have not decided which distro I am going to use, and I am >about to get to that part of the documentation. I am considering Emacspeak >for the speech part. I installed Slackware 8.0 on a system earlier this year, and made one of the partitions a little smaller than I probably should have. The documentation indicated that installing all of the software would require about 2 GB as I recall, so I set up the boot partition with about 2 GB of space. Unfortunately, this did not leave me much room for installing large packages in the future, so I have probably set myself up for a lot of extra hard drive repartitioning at some point in the future. My talking box uses Slackware 8.0 with Speakup--a nice, smooth running set up. I set up the boot partition on this system to be about 3.5 GB, so I have a little room for expansion. Both systems have 3 partitions on them: 1. Boot partition--contains all of the system software and extra utilities. I considered setting up a separate partition for /tmp, but these systems do not get huge quantities of multiple users playing...uhm...working all at once, so I decided that leaving it on the boot partition would be okay for now. 2. /home--user accounts, ftp directory trees, and archiving. I made these partitions large because I know that given enough time, I will probably produce a lot of data. If the root partition gets too full on either system, I suppose I could set up some symbolic links to hidden directories on these partitions if I need to, but that would be a temporary fix at best--best to repartition the drive if things get that full. 3. swap partition--system swap area. The documentation I read indicated that I should make a swap partition twice the size of main memory, up to 128 MB. Both of these systems contain 64 MB of RAM, and I was pretty sure that little if anything would be done on either of them to force large amounts of swapping. I just wanted to get the numbers close to what was suggested while recognizing that the exact values were not too critical, so I wound up with 169 MB of swap on one system, and 120 MB of swap on the other. The system with 169 MB of swap space might be used for some simple graphics work later on, so I felt comfortable making the swap space a little larger. Anyone who is considering setting up swap spaces much larger than this might want to think about how much time might be required to transfer all of the data between main memory and the swap partition on the hard drive--if lots of swapping is anticipated, perhaps installing some more RAM would be a better solution. I hope this rambling helps a little. Have a _great_ day! -- Ralph. N6BNO. Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O. rreid at sunset.net http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid Opinions herein are either mine or they are flame bait. SLOPE = (y2 - y1) / (x2 - x1)
