Linux on top of MS OSes... (continue from last posts)

[CP]

Continue from here.

I'm a bit confuse about the "/" and "/boot" partition. Anyway, how many partition does Linux needs? Sounds like more than one ("/', "/boot" ... etc). Thanks again.

 

[Electrode]

Linux (and all other *NIXen for that matter) only need one partition. You can put everything on one big partition and everything will be fine. Personally, I suggest making a seperate partition for swap space, but even that isn't a requirement.

 

[Tiger]

You can do as Electrode said and jam it all into one partition but it's generally accepted not to do this from a system security point of view. If you use seperate partitions it's easy to recover from catastophic failure and only replace what got broken instead of the entire system. Unless the machine your running is newer with a lot of memory, say more than 256M you should have a swap partition.

I generally setup my Linux boxes with "/", "/swap", "/usr", and "/var" partitions.

 

[CP]

thanks a lot.

 

[Nothinman]

You should have a swap partition no matter how much memory you have, infact it's best to have a swap partition 1.5x the size of your physical memory if you're using a 2.4 kernel because the swapping code is much less agressive about freeing swap space and can potentially run out of swap or at the very least grind incessantly as it frees swap space to swap more out.

For a home machine I would just recommend:

/
/home
swap

Making /usr and /var seperate is a good idea for a multi-user environment, but not necessary for a personal machine.