It's kind of like a partition on a Windows system, but better. If you have one drive with three partitions on it you will have C:, D:, and E: drives. If you added another drive, with one big partition it would enumerate as drive F:.

In *NIX you could just mount all those partitions under the / tree. Plus as mentioned before you can use various mount options (user access, different file system types)

One more question. WHAT IS PAGING SPACE? Do I need it, and if so, then how much should I have? How can I get it?

*****Colonel Panic*****

Paging space or a "swapfile" is like the paging file on a Windows system. Not all the dynamic memory needed can come from your RAM, especially if you want to play all your games, listen to mp3s and run Gimp.
So what happens is the system uses this "swapfile" as extra memory - like simulated RAM. Once the normal RAM is starting to get full things start getting "swapped" to this area on your hard drive. When the system needs the info again, it swaps places with something in RAM again.
Unfortunately on some Windows systems if both RAM and the paging file are too full then you get a BSOD.
Most Linux installs make the swapfile on it's on space on the harddrive ie. it has it's own partition. If you go to a terminal on Linux and type "top" then you should see how much RAM and swapfile are being used.

Cheers

ummm... guru's correct me if i'm wrong here, but isn't the paging space the swap partition on the hard drive? it's supposed to be about twice the size of your physical memory.

Um, I think this is what he (non gender) is saying. Isn't a swapfile the same is the swap? I believe that he(non gender) is saying that the paging space IS the swap space. Is there a limit to how much paging space you can have? Like, if you have too much, will you get a kernel panic? I tried linux for windows (that's back in the day when I didn't know anything about computers.), put a HUGE swap space, rebooted, and couldn't boot into linux because I got a kernel panic!

*****Colonel Panic*****

the /usr needs to be able to grow, almost everything you will install later will likely go there. For this reason it should be left under a partition called / with lots of space. If you make it a partition you will most likely limit it's size in doing so. In the mean time until the space is needed it can be used by other folders in /



Once you partition you limit the size and or limit the use of free space.

I have seen it written not to exceed 128MB on a swap partition. I don't know why and this is probably old stuff. When I installed RH 7.1 with 256 MB ram it created a swap size of 529160 which is about double.

When you are told to make your swap about twice the size of your physical memory this normally assumes that you have an amount of physically memory in a real server somewhere thats been worked out against the needs of your users and their averge process requirements etc... if this is a home system then have as much or as little swap as you need. My machine with 256MB of physical doesn't have any swap, just becuase I never end up using the whole 256MB... There a 128MB swap partition there somewhere but its never been swapponed (yet)...

cheers

Jamie...

Linux can have up to 8 different swap partitions each having up to 2 GB.
The grand total of swap space is not 8 GB but 4 GB, I'm not 100% sure of 4 GB but it is less than 8 GB.