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Kissi5559 wrote:
> Hello Folks,
> I am new to linux and about to install linux for the first time. I have 18Gig
> hard drive which is set as logical because I have another hard drive as primary
> with Win2K installed. I also have 256M of memory. Can any one please help with
> recommendations or suggestions as to what partitions to have and the sizes?
> Is it OK to leave the drive this drive as a logical drive?
> Thanks.

Ohh. You've entered a religious discussion.

Some Linux OS's releases used to use an older version of LILO, where the
partition with the boot kernel and other widgets could not be past
cylinder 1023 at all, and some BIOS's had similar limits. Newer versions
of LILO and GRUB boat loaders in particular no longer have this limit,
so you no longer have to create a small, separate "/boot" partition to
put the rest of the drive on a larger partition, but it's popular and
won't hurt you with a big drive available.

Second, swap space. Swap has had all sorts of weird requirements over
the years, but I'd say these days make it as big or bigger than your
RAM, and if you're going to build really, really big stuff and need lots
of swap space, buy more RAM first. But in your case, a Gig of swap would
be very generous.

Third, breaking up / into multiple partitions. Don't unless you have to.
Sure, you can try to outguess the size of various requirements for the
future and tune it all to fit your needs *just right*. But since backing
up no longer requires separate partitions and hasn't since "dump" went
out of fashion and "tar" got smarter, just don't bother splitting it up
unless you want to set a special partition for special file systems,
playing with custom software, writing stuff on FAT32 for sharing with
your Windows OS, etc.