On Monday 10 Nov 2003 11:33 pm, Bryan Phinney wrote: > On Monday 10 November 2003 04:41 pm, Melissa Reese wrote: > > Is there some literature I can read up on beforehand that explains how > > I might want to partition the drive? > > Here is a quick tutorial about partitions under Linux.
and also: swap Which the system uses to extend the amount of memory available. It's exactly like the pagefile on Windows, but on Linux it's always a seperate partition (it's more efficient that way.) Once you're running, "swap" is invisible. Linux uses a single directory tree for all files, there is no C: or D:, instead it "mount"s each disk somewhere in that directory tree. You always need a partition to be "/". That's the root of the tree if you like (and it's called the root partition.) Apart from "swap" that is all you actually need. So you could partition the disk into two; a large / and a small swap (less than 1G, somewhat dependant on the amount of memory in the computer.) However there are various reasons that you might want to make other partitions and mount them in various places. The main reasons are: 1. if a partition fills up then only that partition is affected. 2. if a partition is corrupted or compromised then only that partition is affected. 3. a second disk would be a set of partitions that would have to be mounted somewhere. There are a small set of places that partitions are usually mounted, Bryan has given a fairly complete list of them. Another one that's probably worth considering is a small partition formated as a FAT filesystem (that's the old Windows format, and small because it is inefficient on large partitions), because Linux can read NTFS (the new windows format) but it is not recommended to write to it. Having a FAT partition would allow you to copy data back and forth between Linux and Windows. You would usually mount that somewhere of your own devising. (For example /mnt/windows, /windows or /home/melissa/windows.) -- Richard Urwin
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