Hello all-

I have just started my journey down the Linux road and I have a question about getting my hard drive ready for red hat 7.0. Here goes. I already have win me on the hard drive (20gig) in one big partition. If I repartition the drive in to two 10gig drives using the utility that comes with my distribution of linux will that be sufficient? Or, will Linux need more than one Partition? I have two machines and the one I intend to install Linux on first is just our backup machine so I don't fear losing the windows ME installation but I do want to do things the right way. Is there an exhaustive step by step guide to installing red hat available for new guys such as myself? I really want to know what all the fuss is about and expand my horizons a little. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks

Okay the best way or easiest set up for Linux is to setup three partitions for Linux alone or the best way for just a desktop Linux box.

They are as follows:

/boot This will be for your boot information. Usually I set mine to just 16 MB.
/ This is your root paritions where everything in the file system heirarchy will follow. Think of it as C in Windows. This can be what ever size you want, usually I set mine to 2 GB or larger.
/swap This partition is required. It is for memory swapping. Make this partition about double you size of RAM, or don't exceed 100 MB for this partition. Anything larger is really unecessary.

You can create a /home partition, which is good but unecessary. There are many ways t partition for a Linux install but what I stated above is the basic setup I would recommend.