As for partitions...
I heard once that it speeds up the boot if you have a boot partition even though unnecessary in modern BIOSes. Make it like 50Mb.
I keep everything else in the same partition. However, I think I''m going to reformat now that SuSE9.0 came out, and this time I''ll put /home as a seperate partition (fairly large - proportionate to the number of users) because I think its better to "keep data separate". I regret not doing this before because otherwise I''d be able to just reformat the other partitions and leave /home alone (no pun intended).
For swap, it depends mostly what you use it for. If you''re planning on having hundreds of huge images opened in GIMP at once, then use a lot of swap. Otherwise, my settings are fine (I have 256Mb RAM and 500Mb swap).

I have had experience with SuSE, RedHat, Debian, and OpenLinux, and I rank them in that order (I would prefer OpenLinux if they updated more often). SuSE is especially good for beginners because it has a really friendly tool for handling system settings (YaST2). I''ve heard that Mandrake is also good for beginners, but I''ve never tried it.

The official zorx website

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
Hey, 100MB is overkill for the /boot partition.
Plus, newer system (BIOS after 2000) do not need it.

The purpose of using a separate /boot has nothing to do with BIOS requirements. The idea is that by having /boot as your first partition it doesn''t matter if you resize, add, or move other partitions, and no matter how badly your / partition gets messed up (complete corruption even) your system will still boot.


Drakonite

[Insert Witty Signature Here]

The only reason to have seperate partitions for /boot, /usr, /home, /etc, is for security. If they are seperate partitions you can choose how they are mounted to prevent an attacker from exploiting the drive (in particular, /boot should not even be mounted by default).

The only one you *really* need is /. One partition, with everything (swap isn''t required, but is highly recommended). My current Gentoo setup has three - /boot, /, and swap. OpenBSD uses /boot, /, /temp, /usr, /var, /home, and swap.

I would say use Partition Magic to make a Linux partition, then recreate that with fdisk, or whatever program Red Hat uses (diskdruid?). Just use whatever Red Hat''s installer recommends (probably ext3).

Red Hat''s setup is nice if you''ve never done it before, and their documentation is top notch. Very easy to set up. They''ve got the installer almost up to Windows'' level last I checked (around v7). Just keep things simple, and use one big FS block + swap.

Ahh... so much to read... i''ll read later..


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an interesting note, up and coming Linux kernel version 2.6 does not need a swap partition. It''ll work with a swap file.

2.4 will use a swap file, but it sucks at it. (slower)