Windows WILL die

[smokey]

This time I have it all figured out except I have a few questions:

1) How should I partition my 80gig entirely for linux.
2) What Filesystem should I use?

btw. Im using Mandrake 9.0
btw2. I downgraded my gfx card to a GeForce3 Ti200 especially for use with *nix.

[Master of Reality]

you want to partition 80 GB for just one distro?

you'll probly want to use the standard Ext3 or ReiserFS, i am using both and i dont see much difference in them.

[choasforages]

A, stick the radeon back in there, ATI now supports "powered by ati" card along with the "built by ati" cards

B, i would recomend either rieserfs, or xfs. both are journald file systems in my usage, beat ext2, and ext3, well xfs is the quickest for a desktop machine so go with it.

as for the partitions, give your self 100mb of
for /boot
5 gigs for /
and 15 gigs for /usr
and the old rule of thumb, a swap partition that twice the size of the amount of ram in the machine

and the rest on either /home or make a partion called /stuff and chmod it 1777 then dump mp3's iso's games' and other stuff in there, or atleast thats how i do it. i think voidmain or calum or somebody has a picture that detials it out

[Master of Reality]

dont put 100mb for boot unless your planning to have lot of other kernels there for soem werid reason. You barely need 10mb for boot, but i recommend 20mb

[caveman_piet]

For interest sake - the /boot on my laptop
is 16MB and I can barely fit two different
systems on there. To have a backup kernel
during an upgrade is all that fits.

A new kernel upgrade forces me to delete the
previous (old) and stable kernel to make space.
(Running RH 7.3 - now on 2.4.28-18.7.x and
17.7x as backup)

I'm allways in a panic when I have do that.

I found that with the newer kernels (and a big
drive - to use a little extra will not hurt).
I any case - on an 80GB drive - how much is
one cylinder in MBytes anyways?

Just my one cents worth (if that

[TheQuirk]

[Master of Reality]

what happens if you let linux auto partition it? does it just make 1 bigass "/" partition?

[Calum]

it tends to.

the autopartitioning in a normal GUI linux installer is not too bright. it's about as clever as the windows installer if you let it do stuff by itself in my opinion.

[smokey]

Thanks for all the very helpful replies

My current box is set up (now) like this

250ish meg /boot/ (dont know why)
5gigish /
17gigish /home
30gig NTFS (from my previous windows backup drive)
10gigish /stuff folder which I can reduce to maybe try out another OS.

I am running Mandrake 9.0 and have the Nvidia drivers installed and working properly as well as WineX.

[preacher]

Here is the easiest way to partition a linux box. Double the amount of ram for swap, and everything else for /.

In my case on my laptop, it was 256mb for swap, and the rest of the 3 gig linux section for root(/).

 This might not be the most secure way, but you dont have to worry about the complexity of multiple partitions. If you are running a webserver, you might consider running it off of a seperate partition for extra security. Also if you are going to have remote shell users, you will need a chrooted partition.

[choasforages]

i alsa like partitions, becuase is usually easer for me to take /stuff  or something, even / its self i moved / on my netbsd box from one partition to another, it actally works, i just have to tell the boot loader so*/off my a main drive and onto anther driver. like redunancy, like if my 8 gig that i keep redhat dies, i curse and swear, but i havn't lost anything but alot of time making it sweet. but if say the drive /mp3s is one bites it, i curse and swear and probably post a few rants hear cuase my distro will still be working. it obviously dosn't help if its all on one disk, but if its multi partitioned already, its easy to move it