:newbie:
 

I'm looking for some help with a partition scheme. I shoud start by saying that linux is only for playing Moria (and maybe some other roguelikes) and learning. I used Vax/VMS when I was in college (10+ years ago) and I still remember a little about *nix. I have a P4 1.5Ghz 768Mb system with a 20Gb and a 28GB drive as spare parts so I figured I would set up linux system.

Since I'm not going to be installing much other than what comes with Slackware 10 do I need the second disk or should I be ok with just the 20Gb disk? I have tons of spare parts sitting around and I can easily build one more system minus the monitor. Eventually I want to play around with networking and folding.

What should my partition scheme look like? Would I be ok with just making 2 partitions (1.5G swap and rest main) or should I break the disk up into multiple partitions for specific dir's?

Thanks for the help in advance

If you're going to be playing around and learning, I'd advise at least one extra partition for /home. While playing around, you might break something, you might run into an obstacle, or want to change distros in a couple of months. If you have a separate /home partition, you can keep your work and config files without having to mess around with backups, and just replace the system partition. Also, 20GB should be plenty for linux to start with - the system itself isn't likely to grow beyond that. If it was me, and I had no other use for that 28GB drive, I'd make THAT my /home and use the other drive for the system+swap.
BTW, you probably don't need anywhere near 1.5GB of swap - it's just a waste of disk space. There are some recommendations for using RAM*2 for swap space that are just superstition nowadays. If you had <64MB, then it was a reasonable rule. Now it's just silly.

For your RAM in general I just equal my RAM for the swap space. So 512 ram =512 swap. That's just how I do it.

With the parition of your HDD depends all on you. You can break it up. Then if you play to much and crash something you MAY be able to repair it. If you can't though unless you know how to fix it sometimes it's better to have a new installation done :cool:

I would suggest just creating 1 parition for putting your personal data in. This way if you have to reinstall then your personal stuff is safe. Also you could use the space to make a backup of some system configuration files.