Hi guys ,

i have been around and around and around the distro world and have come back to Slackware for another crack .

Just need a few questions answered.

1 : HDD setup

now this is where i get stuck but not if you get my drift .

so i have created my swap file of 8gb

now whats the best setup of the rest of the 52gig i have left .

2 : Xconfig -

i login as root and go startx but it bombs out .

whats the best steps to take to get a working system

Your hard drive setup will depend on how you format, but in general this is a standard basic layout:

(standard MBR)

Partition 1 - formated to Ext4 - mountpoint is /(root)
Partition 2 - formated as Swap - mountpoint is set for swap

(gpt method)

Partition 1 - formated as BIOS Boot or EFI partition - no mountpoint usually unless EFI which is often /boot/EFI or /EFI depending on preference.
Partition 2 - formatted as swap - same as mbr.
Partition 3 - formated as Ext4 - same as mbr.

Some hints:

BIOS Boot or EFI should at least be 100MB in size.
Swap should be x2 your physical RAM, but no more than 8GB.

There are other layouts but this is the simplest ones I know of.

For X11...

Login as root and run xorgsetup. Generally this will setup X11 well enough.

There is no right answer for setting up your harddrive. ReaperX7's advice is a good starting point. As far as swap space, if you intend to hibernate, it should be at least the size of your RAM, if not a bit more. Otherwise, it largely depends on your intended use of your machine and how much RAM you have. Many people can get by with 2GB or less of swap space, while others need substantially more (I have 8GB always available, with another 8GB that I can turn on if needed). If you aren't sure what you'll need, I'd probably recommend 2GB for the swap (and if you intend to hibernate, add your amount of RAM to that number, so if you have 8GB of RAM, I'd do a 10GB swap). For the rest, you can just have one big, giant partition, as ReaperX7 suggested. Once you're more familiar with your usage of your system, you could look at separating some of those partitions (many will keep /home on a separate partition, but it is certainly not required or recommended for everyone).

For X11, running xorgsetup might help, but what would definitely help would be providing us with your video hardware, along with any error messages provided by X. Also, did you do a full or custom install?

Also, as a general guideline, you shouldn't use root to run X. This is highly insecure, and any bugs in any of the programs could possibly wreak havoc on your system (since they would have full root access as well). It is always recommended to log in as a normal user and only escalate privileges when needed (using either su for commands or kdesu for GUIs). To ensure your user has all the recommended groups, use the adduser script, and when it prompts for additional groups, press the up button to select the recommended groups.

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Swap will also depend on what you'll be doing too. 2GB might be fine for general tasks, but you may want upwards of 8GB if you compile large projects.

More advanced file system layouts often include a separate 50-100MB /boot partition, and usually a quota limited /home.

One thing you will notice is I strictly recommended Ext4 rather than my general others like BtrFS, JFS, etc. While JFS is fairly resilient, it can impact performance upon initial writes, but does improve over time. BtrFS is really good but it still requires a separate /boot partition. JFS can be booted directly however. Ext4 is good all around and best to tinker with.

Yes, you shouldn't run X from root, but when setting up the system initially, you should use root to test basic functionality because it has full resource access. Once you test, you then can add users to groups and assign effective permission levels and then use root from sudo or su in your user session.

As bass suggests can you run the following and post the output?

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That is why I stated if s/he didn't know what to set it as, then 2GB is decent for the majority of regular users. Obviously there's exceptions to every rule...

This seems a little too in depth based on the original post. I do agree that ext4 is a good default file system for most users.

Use LVM with a small boot partition. It's especially useful when you want to migrate to a newer, larger disk.

Here is what I do on my machines, which does not mean I know what I am doing...

Root / should be about 2GB to 4GB
Swap partition should be no less than the size of your RAM (or even twice the size of your RAM).

I like to have separate /tmp /var /usr and /usr/local partitions, which are usually the same size as root, as I compile a lot of stuff.

Your /home should be the rest of your hard disk.

I use XFS only on all partitions, which is very solid.

This being said, if you limited disk space, I think having just two partitions / and swap is just fine.

If you expect a lot of changes in disk hardware, use LVM as the partition type, as this will give you a lot of flexibility.

Here is the df of my machine:

For X, as many have said before, run xorgsetup as root and you should be in business.

This should not be suggested until the user is familiar with how they'll use their system. For many that will be overkill, for some, it won't be enough. It is best to suggest a generic approach until more information can be gathered.

what happened with the KISS system???

Root including Home / 15-20GB
swap = RAM
Balance of drive for a common separate NTFS partition for your DATA.

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Why would you want to store your data on NTFS?

KISS would be:
/root
swap
/home

My advice:
52G /
8G swap

No need for a /home partition. This layout maximizes the usage of the space on disk.

A lot of people dual boot with Windows. An NTFS partition would allow easy sharing between the two.

But if you're on a Linux only system, an NTFS partition is probably not recommended.

But your example you didn't list a windows OS partition. :P

Back when I dual booted I used a ext driver for windows.

It wasn't my example. Just trying to offer some reasoning why the poster might've included an NTFS partition.

Last time I had a dual-booted system, I tried to find a Windows driver for ext4, and I seemed to always run into issues. One of them was recommended to not be in r/w mode due to possible filesystem corruption. And a few others were separate applications to read the contents, but they didn't mount the drives physically in Windows (the drives could only be accessed within the application), so if you wanted to work on a file, you had to save it from the application to an actual drive listed in My Computer.

Granted, it's been several years since I've looked (I don't think I've dual-booted in over 6 years and even then, it was mostly Slack with the occasional reboot into Windows), so things may have changed substantially. But ever since the ntfs-3g driver came out, I've found it easier to just use NTFS within Linux than trying to use ext in Windows. In fact, up until late last year, I still had drives from my dual-boot days that were using NTFS. I was just too lazy to back everything up to another drive just to switch the drive to ext4. I never ran into any problems with it, and without checking my fstab or partition tables (or a few other places if you're really sleuthy), you'd have no idea they were running NTFS. I've since replaced those drives and now run everything using ext4.