Hi there
In spite of all the horror stories I've been reading here in this forum
over the last couple of weeks, I've decided to install Linux-Mandrake 7.1
on my PC.
In preparation for this event I've been doing a lot of RTFM-ing (reading
manuals and HOWTOs, for those who need a translation). One idea that
appeals to me is having separate partitions for /, /boot, /home, etc. While
the FMs are full of useful detail, they all seem to *just* fall short of
answering my question. So I turn to the Linux-newbie brains trust for
assistance.
Right. I have a 13.6G disk drive which I want to set up as a dual-boot
system. Once I've got Linux running, I plan to copy the Windows files from
my existing drive onto the FAT32 partition of the new drive. My Windows
system currently has a 3.2G disk partitioned as 2G and 1.2G (roughly). I
have a lot of spare room on this so I think I can get by with a single 3G
FAT32 partition on the new disk.
[On reflection, this might not work as I'm still using Win95. I seem to
recall this not being able to handle partitions over 2G.]
So, with around 10G at my disposal for Linux, my first question is "How big
do I need to make the individual partitions to use this space efficiently
and effectively?"
The second question is, having created all these partitions, how does the
install program know which is which, so that what needs to go into /home
(for example) actually goes to the right partition?
As a Linux newbie I'm likely to want to install everything that comes with
the distro, and probably install and try lots of other stuff as the months
go by. I'd like to create an environment that doesn't make this any more
difficult than it needs to be.
For what it's worth my current system is three years old and uses an AMD K6
233 with 64M of RAM. I expect to upgrade it in the next few months to
something like an Athlon 700 with maybe 128M of RAM.
I look forward to your learned responses. Thanks in advance.
Regards
(Another) Lance
