Installing linux, Noob question here
 

ok, i have decided on slackware, mainly cause everyone i know that uses linux uses it.. which makes me believe it is a good one to run. But i do not know where to begin to install it. I have downloaded the ISO and Burned it to Disc. what is the next step. I once did try an install of RH and it had an install program, does slackware have that? :confused:

Secondly. What is a good Swap File size. I have 40 or so gigs to work with, with a 3Ghz P4 and a gig of ram.

Thanks

Rogan

if you burn the iso to the cd correctly, then just put your cd into your drive and reboot and the comp will boot the cd granted your bios will look to the cd-drive first for booting (you said u did redhat, so this shouldn't be a problem)

slackware's installer is straightforward, just not pretty
i suggest that you either make some ext3 partitions beforehand or do some reading on fdisk (the partitioning utility)

you have a gig of ram; the idea is that swap should be twice the ram, but be real; in linux, you will very unlikely ever use that kind of ram, but in case you want some swap (it doesn't hurt), don't use anything more than 512 megs; many will tell you not to use more than 256 megs (depends on how powerful the programs you will run; i use games like warcraft 3 and simcity on my box with 256 ram, the most swap i've used is 180/509 megs)

the rule of thumb for a swap partition is double the size of your ram. You have a pretty large size of ram there. If I were you I would go with 1 gig because the memory is very large for an average user; they won't even touch the swap!

Hmmmm


I guess the next question i should ask is, if i make the swap partition to big, will that hurt performance??

I have two 80gig Western SE drives. i am gonna Split one of them, so that half the drive is for windows, and the other half is for Linux. with the second drive that is jsut gonna get one partition that will be for storage and the like, so that both OS's can access it..

so i have more than enough space to give it a 1 gig swap, if that is not detrimental to the system.

Rogan

Having a larger swap file doesn't hurt performance at all.

Awsome....

Now i have to do somthing i really do not want to, format in FAT..

Oh well... The price you have to pay