newbie mount point problems

Name is John, and I want to set up SuSe8 on my computer.
I have a 1.2Athlon with 512 Mbs of sdram.

I would like to use dual boot with Boot Magic 7 from my root partition.
I have aquired a copy of Partition Magic,and have partitioned my H/D. as such.

1: I have 1027.6 Mbs of a swap File.

2: I have 3 ext2 partitions
3:#1 is 3176.9 mbs
4: #2 is 3161.2 Mbs
5: #3 is 4008.4 mbs

In my My Sams SuSe Book, It states that during set-up, I can tell SuSe Linux what filesystems should receive what parts of the
Linux directory tree or Mount points.
/
/usr
/var
/opt
/home4
/boot
(no entry)
(other entry)
At this point I am styamied, and need expert help and advice on
these mount points with my above hardware confiruration. as I
think they could be helpful to me down the line.

Thank for any help you can show me
John Cutts
bootlegr@dsisp.net

ok... first of all i would recommend re-partitioning and making a 200 MB swap (i know people with 512 MB of RAM and their swap is almost never used).
THen the easiest thing to do is make 1 big partition for all of your linux OS (linux takes up about 2GB but you will probably want more than that to add software and such). When you install, you can choose to put "/" on your only linux partition and it automatially will have the other mount points under "/" as subdirectories.

The way the install is talking about is you can separate your hard drive into several different partitions and give them each a mount point, the mount points are kinda like subdirectories in windows.

another note:
/tmp is where temporary files are stored'
/usr is where user (personal) documents are stored
/var is where variable information is stored, such as a website
/etc is where the linux configuration files are stored
/boot is where the boot-up files are
/home is basically a personal documents folder (it will usually have a subdirectory with the users names)
/opt .... i'm not sure what it is for, because i am using red hat and not SuSe.

hope this helps

Druaga seems to be following me around! every time i go to read a topic here, he's posted there first! (no.. ehh, that means i'm following h...) never mind!

what Druaga says is right on the mark. I would wait until after you have installed it and so on to create a new partition

Further, here is a really useful page about getting started in linux. the very first page covers your exact question.
The credit for finding this page goes to Acid-Kewpie for including it in his signature!

IMHO, for home installation, the best scheme is:

/
/home
/usr/local
swap

Why?

If you want to try new distros or upgrade your old one, you don't need to backup you personal files and don't have to reinstall the programs you compiled (mostly in /usr/local).

You can also reformat your / partition and reinstall everything from a tape, or cdrom, or other media, to eliminate fragmentation issues (much lower than Win*, BTW), for example.

I use a 200MB Quantum for my /home and a 810MB Quantum for my / and have 60MB swap, shared 30 + 30 on each drive.

If I had, f.e., a 20GB drive, I would partition it this way:

/ 8GB
/home 9.8GB (where to put all those mp3??? ;-)
/usr/local 2GB (most software you'll want will come from your distro CDROM)
swap 0.2GB (200MB)
------------------------------
Total 20GB

You can mess and play with your drive as you want. I'm just suggesting what I'd do myself.

HTH,

vfs.

http://home.c2i.net/dark/linux.html THANKS a million for this site CALUM, its about the best I have seen. Just printed out the 34 pages, and have lots of reading material now. It seems to address the problems I described, and will set me on the right track. He does say the new Kernels ver 2.4+ need a swapspace of 2x physical ram, and the SuSE8 falls into that catagory.

Swap space isn't, in fact, an absolute truth. YMMV.

F.e., you really don't need 1024MB at home if you have 512MB of RAM. But if you have 32MB, 64MB of swap will be good.

Got the idea?

I recommend you www.ibiblio.org and www.linuxdoc.org . There are lots of Linux docs around for free.

HTH,

vfs