On Thursday 10 May 2007 10:00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > Looking at installing for the first time. The drive is currently NTFS. > > > Will Linux install to this or do I need to redo it as FAT(32)? > > > Will Linux read NTFS formatted partitions? > > > > I assume you will be wanting to do this installation on a machine that > > is currently running XP Pro, which by default formats the disk as NTFS. > > > > You need to decide if you want to retain XP and install Linux as well so > > that you can dual boot, or if you are going to flick XP and only have > > Linux. > > > > Linux does not use NTFS as its base format, it usually uses ext3 > > (depends on the distribution). If you want to have both XP and Linux > > then you can ntfs-ng to access the XP partition. > > This is what I do: > > * reboot the machine from Ubuntu 7.04 live CD (other distros work too) > * go to System/Administration/Gnome Partition Editor > * Shrink the NTFS partition according to need (50% ?) > * create a new Linux swap partition (twice your ram size? about 2 gig) > * create a new Linux ext3 partition in the remaining space > * leave any hidden Windows recovery partition as it is > * apply changes > > then use the installer function you will see on your desktop and let the > very clever system do the rest. [snip]
The recommendation of swap == 2x RAM is oldfashoned and may even be bad. Googling will give you more than you ever wanted to know ... IMHO you'd hardly ever want more than 512M of swap. If you did you'd know and understand why. This is a busy server/desktop that has been running for months: top - 10:02:21 up 63 days, 22:36, 29 users, load average: 0.06, 0.07, 0.07 Tasks: 202 total, 4 running, 198 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 1.4%us, 3.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 94.1%id, 0.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.8%si, 0.0%st Mem: 1027068k total, 1011776k used, 15292k free, 88764k buffers Swap: 1509988k total, 277160k used, 1232828k free, 383616k cached James PS the argument goes that a runaway process gets to use huge swap then cripples the machine while on smaller swap it runs out of memory more quickly and gets killed. (Thats wot it said, I promise :-) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
