A friend of mine if going to give me Linux Redhat 9 in a few days, so I figured I''ll need to partion my 40 gig HD. How much room should I partion for Linux? And what type FST? LinuxEx2, Ex3, or Swap (Using PartionMagic 8.0)?
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"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he will eat for a life time." -Chinese Proverb [edited by - GameDev Staff on September 27, 1989 9X:58:97 XMS] For violating Article 43 Page 456 Paragraph 251 Line .042]

Hey, I have 18 gigs partitioned for my linux red hat, but it depends on what you're going to put on there. I have 13 gigs free so... If you install all of the Red Hat stuff, like games, programs, ect (which I did) , it is about 5-6gig.

As for FST, I would go with ext 2 if you want speed, and ext 3 for journaling (in case it crashes I think) I would go with 2. If you want to make sure you don't lose anything, I guess ext 3.

Swap isn't an FST I don't think. Make the swap around 256-512 mb. Then you need a 100mb Linux boot partition in the front (So you'll have to move your c: partition 100mb over to put the linux boot there. And the linux boot MUST be a primary).

You can make your swap and main partition logical(someone check me on the swap being logical please)

That's about it I think, so you will have 3 partitions in all..
First: Linux Boot || 100mb || Primary || In beginning of the drive
Second: Swap || 256-512mb || Logical || After your windows(c: ) partition
Third: Main (aka: / ) || 10+gigs || Logical || After swap

So like this:
Linux boot || C: || Swap || Main Linux Partion ( / )

Hope that helps
If I made any mistakes, please correct me

[edited by - HTML on October 30, 2003 6:13:40 PM]

You need a swap seperate from your regular file system -- this is where linux virtual memory happens (iirc). On windows, this is stored in a file on a regular drive, but Linux needs its own partition (more efficient). The lore I''ve heard for swap is the same size as RAM if you have a lot of RAM, or 1.5x RAM if you don''t have much RAM... this was from a few years ago, so I''m not sure if it''s still current though.

Also, I believe you can switch between ext2 and ext3... iirc ext3 is really ext2 with journaling enabled.

I think it''s generally also recommentded you set up different partitions for / (which contains anything not in any other partition), /var, /tmp and possibly /home. The rational behind putting /var in a seperate partition anyway is that all logfiles go in /var, so if anyone is doing stuff over the network which causes massive amounts of log entries, it will limit the damage, and prevent it from interfering with other parts of the system. Of course, for a home system this isn''t such a big issue...

Rationaly behind /tmp and /home in seperate partitions is similar... although managing 4 partitions for Linux is a bit of a pain, so you might want to stick it all just in one from that point of view

K, I''ll go ahead and partion 15gig into ex2 for speed.

So how do I choose which OS to boot? Do I need a program or something?

I was thinking about using my old 10gig slow HD, so I figured I could just set the BIOS every single boot. Now, I just think it''s better if I partion my better HD rather than using 2 HDs. Plus the fact that I can''t get my old HD to work!~



WiseElben.com | My Journal | My Profile



Projects: nMagic - Voted #1 in DOSGamesWeekly, a nondiversial DOS lover magazines.



"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he will eat for a life time."
-Chinese Proverb
[edited by - GameDev Staff on September 27, 1989 9X:58:97 XMS] For violating Article 43 Page 456 Paragraph 251 Line .042]

Hopefully someone with some real knowledge will answer this question with enough detail and authority to render this post redundant; in the absence of such a person, I will add my two cents:

First, I do not believe that the /boot partition needs to be the first one on the drive. In fact, if you make it so, you will not be able to install an old version of Windows (non-NT kernel, I should think) since these do require that they be the first partition on the primary hard drive. Furthermore, while Linux used to require that either the primary or the /boot partition (if one exists) be within the first n (1024?) cylinders of the hard drive, I have been told this is no longer the case.

Second, you may want to find out more about the difference between an ext2 and an ext3 file system; I myself am running ext3 for my Linux setup (a non-journalling file system means that if the computer goes down whilst writing to the drive, e.g. in a power outage, data is trashed forevermore, while a journalling file system can reconstruct the original data); I do not know how serious the performance hit is, but it''s worth looking into.

I''m a Linux newbie, so treat these things above as food for thought, not canonical fact.

As for selecting which OS to boot, any Linux distribution will probably come with no less than two programs (called boot loaders) to perform this task; grub (which I myself use) and lilo (which is older; I prefer grub, but I hear that lilo may work on some systems, or in some circumstances, where/when grub will not). Just make sure to install Windows first: Whenever you install Windows, it will overwrite your master boot record and set the computer to always boot Windows. (This can, of course, be fixed, but unless you need to reinstall Windows on a computer with Linux already on it, it''s always easier to install Windows first.)

First of all, why are you installing RedHat 9, when you can get 10? Anyways, I would recommend RedHat''s documentation about the partitioning, I''m sure they''ve got a lot of detail and they have a partitioning program built into the install.

The official zorx website

First off, I recommend using a different distro and not RedHat.

Now that that''s over with...

Linux shouldn''t care if it''s partitions are primary or logical. If fact you can run linux out of a loopback and/or encrypted filesystem for all it cares. Unless you are using a very old or very broken BIOS (are I''m sure you aren''t) then you don''t have to worry about the 1024 cylindar boundry.

There are a lot of choices other than just ext2/3. The main choices are ext2, ext3, reiserfs, XFS, and JFS. Of those ext2 is the only one that does not do journaling. Ext3 is the same as ext2 but it has a journal attached, it''s not the fasted filesystem but it''s probably the most stable. Reiserfs is probably the fastest, and also very good with small files although some people have had stability issues with it in the past (a recent version of reiser should be solid though)

Whatever you choose, you really should use a journaled filesystem. The journaling protects them from corruption due to system crashes or power outages, which can save you both time and data Even the slightly slugish ext3 (when compared to reiserfs or ext2) is still plenty fast.

The biggest recommendation I have for you is DO NOT USE PARTITION MAGIC TO MAKE THE FILESYSTEMS! You can change your partitions with it, but use the filesystem creation stuff that comes with the linux installer. They are far better than partition magic.

As for partition size...

I highly recommend making a partition for /boot, somewhere between 10MB and 100MB (10MB is plenty but 100MB doesn''t hurt.) and having it mounted r/o by default. Use either ext2 or ext3 for it.

I have a / partition of around 6GB (not includeing my /home dir) and have installed a ton of things before I reach that ammount. If you are using a seperate /home partition (recommended but not neccisary) 6-8GB is all you should ever need. If combining /home and / (which you probably are) 10-14GB is plenty.

For swap... All the "rules" for how much swap to use are pretty much crap IMO. It depends a lot on what you plan to be doing. Chances are your HDD is big enough it is best to err to the large size. Take a number like 768MB or 1GB, subtract your RAM, and use that value (that''s what I typically do). Or just use a 512MB swap partition. I personally have 192MB ram with 512swap and run a ton of apps at once with plenty of multimedia stuff and have plenty of swap left over.


I think someone asked about switching between OS''s... Linux will install a bootloader when you install it (either GRUB or LiLo). The bootloader will give you a menu when you start your computer as to what OS you want to run.


Hope that helps. If I missed any questions let me know


Drakonite

[Insert Witty Signature Here]

I don''t know enough to know what I am doing yet but I kind of like 2* ram for swap size.

Anyway don''t underestimate teh size of /usr ... for some reason I usually do, heh, and am currently sitting at 94% of capacity. (eek!) Anyway here is my df output, but I would not suggest how I did it (in my case less for /home and more for /usr

quote:
$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad1s2a 257838 141954 95258 60% /
devfs 1 1 0 100% /dev
/dev/ad1s2g 3886126 2354210 1221026 66% /home
/dev/ad1s2e 257838 3728 233484 2% /tmp
/dev/ad1s2f 4125838 3579686 216086 94% /usr
/dev/ad1s2d 257838 43702 193510 18% /var
/dev/ad1s1 9513784 8006792 1506992 84% /windows

Oh this is on FreeBSD(5.0) so milage will vary. Also this is a 20gig drive; with windows (fat32) hogging just under half.

I also put a vote for letting the distro''s tools do the formatting... *should* be fewer chances of errors. An speaking of errors speed (ext2) means nothing when you data is foobared! (i.e. ANY extra chace of saving your data is good, imho. So *I* would go ext3 and jernaling.

Luck
Anyway luck

Hey, 100MB is overkill for the /boot partition.
Plus, newer system (BIOS after 2000) do not need it.

I would suggest the following (based on personal experience):
swap partition - SWAP + RAM = total memory available. Use as much as you like (1G-2G total should be enough)
/ - Primary partition, used for everything not covered elsewhere.
/usr/local - All stuff not covered by the distribution installation (like extra libs from the network, compiled from sources).
/home - The home directories for all users (except the root, but you should never log as root anyway! )

One good trick is to make /home a link to /usr/local/home. So if you latter decide to change distributions, or need to re-install for any reason, just wipe the main partition, re-install, and then just replace the link. All the stuff you added is back in place, along with your files.

The above is fine for a home PC, when builting for a server security reasons suggest a different partitioning scheme:
/usr - Read Only, used from programs and stuff
/var - Read-Write, used for data storage by the system
/home - Read-Write, users'' home directories
/ - Read Only, as small as can be. (/etc and /tmp should be soft links to a place under /var)

Or, if using a central server for most files:
/usr - Read Only, mounted from the server
/home - Read-Write, mounted from the server
/ - Read Only, small and mounted from the server
/var - Read-Write, local partition
/tmp - Read-Write, local partition
/etc - Read-Only (?), local
/usr/local - Read-Only, local partition

The networked case can be more elaborate, but you should read more about it on the Internet, since I have no experience with it, the above is what I remember.

quote: Original post by WiseElben
K, I'll go ahead and partion 15gig into ex2 for speed.

So how do I choose which OS to boot? Do I need a program or something?

I was thinking about using my old 10gig slow HD, so I figured I could just set the BIOS every single boot. Now, I just think it's better if I partion my better HD rather than using 2 HDs. Plus the fact that I can't get my old HD to work!~



WiseElben.com | My Journal | My Profile



Projects: nMagic - Voted #1 in DOSGamesWeekly, a nondiversial DOS lover magazines.



"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he will eat for a life time."
-Chinese Proverb
[edited by - GameDev Staff on September 27, 1989 9X:58:97 XMS] For violating Article 43 Page 456 Paragraph 251 Line .042]

What's wrong with Red Hat? I think it's a great distro, I havn't had any problems yet. Besides, it is a great start for WiseElben anyway since he is brand new to linux. It is very stable and works great. I heard Jamd (based on red hat) was good, but never tried it..

That would be great if you could get linux on a separate hd, but I have never done it so I am not sure what you have to do next.

When you install Red Hat, it will install grub which will allow you to pick between 2 os's. Windows and Red Hat. By default they call it dos. You can change this, and you can change what os is at the top of the list. (there is a list, for you it will say:

Red Hat 9 || or vise versa (the windows and red hat switched)
Windows / DOS
then over here there will be a timer ------> 10, 9, 8, 7, ect...when the timer gets to 0 it picks the os on the top. so in the example's case, Red Hat 9, and it will boot that.

EDIT: I used partition magic to make these partitions, I personally thougt it was easier because of the ease of use for partition magic. And as for Red Hat 10, I am using that right now, and it works great. Although, it is only a test version, it can be a little buggy. So if you want, just wait for the final of RH10 and upgrade from 9.

Here are 2 sites you can get iso's and info from.
www.linuxcompatible.org
www.linuxiso.org
http://www.linuxgames.com/ (games for linux, there are many more for that tho)
http://librenix.com/

And you will probably reinstall Red Hat a few times before you get used to fixing it and stuff. So, don't worry if you need to. I thought a good Red Hat book helped me out a little too, but you can probably get most of it off the web anyways.

Oh, and make sure you install both KDE and Gnome when you go through the installation process. Even if you only want one of them, its still a great idea to get both....

Hope that helps



[edited by - HTML on October 31, 2003 11:38:47 AM]