Since I am totally ignorant of everything in the Linux world, I tend
to believe what I read and what people who have experience of Linux tell
me. In one guide for Linux newbies it is recommended that an 80 MB root
partition is quite sufficient, and people have told me that Linux programs
take up extremely little space and RAM. This led me to believe that 900 MB
would be sufficient -- especially since I didn't believe that a 650 MB CD
could install more than, at most, 650 MB of software. Now that you have
explained it I feel pretty foolish for not realizing that the installation
files were compressed. Your recommendation that I swap partitions makes
sense, but since I don't have anything at all on the hard disk as yet, I
might as well repartition it instead. Perhaps it would be better to make a
special /usr partition as well? I'll follow Brett Jones's advice and NOT
install everything. I won't run a news group or an YP server. In fact, I
don't know what I'll use Linux for -- I just want to learn more about it
first. Then eventually it may become clearer to me what I'll mainly use it
for.
The reason I made a rather large /home partition was because I figured
that if I happened to get a lot of things I wanted to keep I could have
those things in this partition even if I eventually would upgrade Linux by
making a completely new installation in the root (and /usr?) partition. Of
course 2 GB is a bit of overkill, and it'll take me several years to fill
that, but, as I said, I didn't realize that linux itself required that much
space. How would you recommend that I partition the hard disk to get the
most out of it? Does for instance this seem reasonable:
/ 300 MB
/usr 1500 MB
/home 1500 MB
(and about 1000 MB for Solaris)
By the way, thanks Brett for wishing me luck with the Solaris
installation. I know that it's a hassle to install it, and it's a pretty
godawful system as well in many ways, but I have to install it since I am
taking a course in Solaris and I need to practice at home. I only hope it
won't be too difficult to double boot with Linux on the same hard disk. At
least I am keeping that disk Micro$oft free (although I do prefer IE over
Netscape -- a Linux version of IE sounds interesting).
Thanks for your help.
DRX
>drx....the initial installation puts virtually nothing in a /home
>partition. So you're trying to do an "everything" install with just 900
>megabytes of space allocated to store all of the compressed software on
>a 600+ megabyte CD. The installation is reporting to you that it needs,
>at a minimum, 524 bytes more allocated to the / partition to
>successfully complete your "everything" installation. Why don't you
>believe this? I recommend that you swap your allocations and give the /
>partition the 1900 megabytes and the /home partition the 900 megabytes.
>That will work and leave a little space for expansion in the /
>partition.
>
>Alan
>
