Hello

Frank (<frank@xyz.ntlworld.com>) wrote:

> I am a newbie, I have read a lot about Linux but it's all a bit
> confusing. This is probity why a lot stay with windows. First I need
> to know is many partitions do I need keep my data safe

First you should do some reading. Linux distributors like Red Hat,
Debian, Mandrake or SuSE have parts of their documentation online. That
would be a good place to start. Additionally, a list with frequently
asked questions and answers is posted to comp.os.linux.misc. Read it at
<http://groups.google.com>.

> I have to been told that I will need 4 /(root), /usr, /home and /swap
> is this right??

Yes and no. You only /need/ one partition holding the root file system.
However, normally you will want to at least have a swap partition (you
can have a swap file on some other partition, but with lower
performance), a root partition, and probably a home partition. This way
you can keep system data and personal data apart. The installation
programs of distributions like Mandrake, SuSE or RedHat make
suggestions on how to partition the drive, and I think this normally
also includes a /usr partition.

> If I do need to reformat at some time do I just reformat the /(root)
> partition (e.g. if I do a upgrade or a different distribution).

If you swith distributions (e.g. from RedHat to Debian), you format the
system partitions, in this case /(root) and /usr. You normally can keep
the home partition, but in some cases the user configuration of some
programs will no longer be usable because the format changed from one
version of the program to the next. In this case you can remove the
configuration files for the specific program.

If you upgrade your distribution (e.g from SuSE 8.1 to 8.2), you do not
have to reformat. Normally you can upgrade the existing system
(although this does not always work perfectly).

> And how big do I need to make the partitions. I have a 30gb H/D, P3
> 866mhz, 512mb ram and ATI Rage Fury 32mb graphics card. His this spec
> ok for Mamdrake 9.2.

Depends on you. A rule of thumb says to make the swap partition twice as
big as your RAM, but I don't know if this is still necessary with 512MB
of RAM. I run the same distribution on two different computers, one has
128 MB RAM + 256 MB swap = 384 MB. I never ran out of memory on that
computer so far, so I don't see why the other computer would need 512
MB RAM and 1 GB of swap (= 1536 MB), making the total available size
four times as big as on the smaller system. So I decided to set the
swap size to 256 MB, and to 512 MB when I upgraded to a larger hard
disk.

If you keep /usr on its own partition, you will probably need between 2
and 5 GB. It really depends. You should search the archive of
comp.os.linux.* at <http://groups.google.com>, you can find a lot of
information there on that topic.

best regards
Andreas Janssen

--
Andreas Janssen
andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674
Registered Linux User #267976