minimal system partition sizes
 

I've lost count of the number of posts and websites I've read all telling me that "partition size will depend on your system", but I can't seem to get even a minimal clue as to how to go about finding out with a really old box.

I'm trying to install slackware (or anything that will run) on a pentium 100 with 40mb and 2hdd (250Mb and 300Mb) with a possible 3rd hdd of 200mb. I'm trying to get it to run a fast dektop (fluxbox?), run a text editor and LAN to my new PC for internet access. If all goes well I'll try to get it to do more (wine for an encyclopedia and execute it remotely on the other machine???)

Can anybody give me some indication of what I should put on each hdd?

(any other useful suggestions short of 'get a real computer are welcome. this is a project to learn:Pengy: )

What speeds do the disks run at?

5400 if I remember correctly

Very cool of you to reuse old hardware, very cool indeed.

Slackware 10 will run like a champ on that hardware. I used to have it on my little Acer laptop with 32MB or ram and 500MB hard drive. You will, of course, want fluxbox as opposed to KDE or Gnome.

Even though I have 120Gb of space I'm very picky about the amount of stuff filing my hard drives. That said here's my current partitioning scheme
/asdf is my media drive, it holds 25 gigs of music, and also is my package backup drive. ( When I compile packages I keep them all on /asdf for later reinstall purposes. )

While I obviously have more space than you will the numbers for the partition sizes should scale well, except for the size of /home where I was just greedy. In my experience the ratios work well. They did on my little Acer.

If they are all the same speed then I would probably suggest:

300=/dev/hda: 300=/
250=/dev/hdc: 100=swap 50=/var 100=/home

Note that I put swap at the beginning of the drive, this should be the fastest part of the drive and if you don't have much RAM then your swap is likely to used more.

The fact that they are on different IDE channels should also help the speed as the 1st drive should be mostly read operations and the second drive will be a mixture and allow your programs to load faster.

minimal system partition sizes
 

On a 486-66 that I use as a NAT/firewall/router/dialer and using Slackware 10
some packages from A, AP and some from N the hard drive is set like
/hda1 30Meg /boot
/hda2 170Meg /

Hope this gives you some idea on your setup.

I've read some documentation on the Amigo Linux homepage and they have a minimal slack distro. In their HOWTO they also speak about A, Ap and N but I'm not sure I understand how this affects the installation process (when I installed slackware 10.0 on another fast PC I didn't see anything related during installation... or did I?)

Anyway, If I get it to work like you did, ten I might put everything on the 300mb disk and leave the 200mb disk for /home. SOunds cool!

min install
 

Yes, on a fast system you may have just blow past the stuff you need.

In the install process just after the partioning business you would go to SETUP

One choice in SETUP is SELECT. In the SELECT menu is where you can choose what packages you want.
On a large hard drive and a fast system, many select everything and then go with a FULL install.

What you may want to do in SELECT is choose just A, AP and N. Then in INSTALL chose the full installation.
This will install everything from A, AP and N. After the installation is complete you may want to go back in
with 'pkgtool' and remove anything you don't like. Or add if that is the case. There are things in the N
group that you will most likely not need or want.

Good Luck, and get back in touch if there are other issues.

I've run into some problems with my cd-rom and second IDE which you can find in a new post

Update
 

It turns out one of the 200mb disks is really a 20mb disk (duh!) and the 300mb disk will not respond to anything (I've tried all the jumper settings etc, but it's somehow blocked) so I had tro discard that as well.

I did find two HDs with bad sectors of a bigger size though. Fortunately the bad sectors were toward the end of the disk so I created partitions that stopped just before the damaged sectors. That has given me a /hda with about 1Gb and another with some 500Mb. Loads of space!! Still, a 120Mhz processor is rather slow so I need a lightweight system...

I'm finishing an installation of RedHat 6, but don't have a network card yet so I'll have to make some changes later. Anyway, getting it up and running is quite a satisfaction, although I'm not very convinced about the load of programs that are installed and that I'm not at all sure I really need. Having space doesn't mean I should waste it...

I read something about BSD being good with old devices, but I think I'll stick with Linux for now.

BTW hda has / and hdb /home ... let you know how it goes

cheers