Loook.
 

I have been wasting time waiting for my other questions to get answered so I will just ask these in another topic for now.

Win XP will be my primary OS, do I install it first?
Must DOS have it's own primary partition?
Should I use Win XP or Linux to partition?

Mr_Floppy4

setup up winXP first, and allocate X amount of space to it.
setup up linux second, and let the installer automatically allocate its space with the remaining on the drive.

I dont think WinXP can make an ext3 or ReiserFS partition, which you will want for linux.

Yes, XP first, then linux.

What about MSDOS? Can I put it on an logical partition of the extended? Will GRUB/LILO find it?

Do I need a swap partition with 512 DDR?

Mr_Floppy4

well these days the use of swapspace is really not necessary...back in the day the rule of thumb was to have double the amount of ram as swap space, but thats when machines had little ram, etc, etc....with 512, and if you wanna be "safe" then i don't think it would be necessary to have any more then a 500meg swap partition...
unless you are using your machine for a heavy load like running a large database or something, then maybe you would want to consider a little bigger swap space..

How about none at all?

Mr_Floppy4

You have 512MB of DDR RAM and you're concerned about sparing 512MB of HD space? That's unique! Anyway, I'm not sure if most distros will allow you to install without declaring <i> some</i> swap space. Personally I would always use some swap --- for the times when your system needs a little extra. It's not going to hurt you. I have 512MB of PC2700 DDR and my system uses swap on a regular basis.

I'd be curious to know, however, if you can actually install the OS without swap....and if so, how the system performs.

I'll try it and get back to you. I know most of my games are faster when I disable vm in XP.

Mr_Floppy4

Linux is not windows. :)

You can just plop it on a logical partition. If it isn't happy booting when you simply tell lilo/grub to boot from that particular partition, then you can trick it into thinking it's on a primary:(Yeah, I know this is for Windows, but it should work for DOS too).