I have a new hard drive and have created three primary and an extended partition. Win XP and backup space have occupied the first two primaries. I want to install Slackware on the remaining space. The question is whether to put swap on the third primary and create logical partitions for /root, /tmp and /home or put /root on the primary. Which would work better? Also, is it worth having /var on a separate partition?
What do you think?

Mikie

If you want to boot from it I believe that you will want the /boot or / on a primary partition. Swap can be on a logical. You may want to put /home on a second partition since it is the directory that can be shared. It would also give you space to download large files like iso's to. Make sure that you give the partition that you have /usr space, it is where software gets installed.

For safey you can have /home on a second partition. Then if you somehow need to change the operation partition, you wont loose all your files.

You could also put /usr on a seperate one so that you have lots of room to install software into the future.

I think that you can do it however you like to.

Generally I use twice the RAM for swap space and I found Slackware's partition managers to work rather well. I also have always used a / partition and a /home partition.
Although you may not like the distro, Mandrakes partition manager may be worth the download and then exit the install after the partition manager. Mandrake has a auto allocate button for users like me who don't want to worry about what partition goes where, then when you install Slack the partitions are already there for you to use.

mmm... that had been a loooong time discussion around here...

I think that some of my information is a little out dated, so correct me if I’m wrong.

Swap space is recommended to be twice the RAM, and you could put it on a virtual partition if you like it. But I've a discussion with a sort of conservative friend (considering a some sun os recommendations) that insisted that you needed tree times your ram for swap space, and that it must be a primary partition. Any way, I've never given to much importance to it...

In the other side, I remember reading that if you want to make your system bootable with Linux (Using Lilo or Grub), you will need to allocated the boot partition before a certain block of your hard drive. I believe that if you have windows working on your computer you should try with partition magic, and the software should tell you about that limit I’m talking about.

The funniest way to find it out is to try it.

Enjoy your linux instalation.