Hello!

I've been trying several Linux distros, looking for an easy transition from Windows (Xandros seems the best).

Yoper interested me; I burned the ISO and tried the install...It always fails with "No Linux partition found, aborting". I've read several threads here and about, but no definitive answer to *what* to create...Or how many...Or what name to give them...

Arkaine23 has posted at least once that there is a thread at Yoper Forums detailing the install process, but the Yoper site has been down for some time.

Could some kind soul direct me to a thread/source/tutorial for creating the required partitions, naming them, and how many are required???

This is the first time I've encountered QTParted, and I'm not familiar with CFdisk either...

Thank you for your time!

You must have a swap partition and you must have a root partition. The swap partition MUST be at least as big as the total available RAM.
That is the bare minimum, it's also not a bad idea to have a separate partition for home as well.

Swap is allocated by telling the partitioner that that partition is swap type of partition. Root and Home are named
/ and /home.

I create Swap first, then root then home.

As mentioned, you need at least two partitions - and I would suggest 3. These are root, swap and /home.
Personally I feel the swap space depends on your installed memory and use of the machine - so for instance, i have 768mb ram - and use the machine for all the usual stuff, so I only allocated 128mb swap. Possibly a mistake - I have started doing some rpm compiling, which could do with extra swap. Making a 768mb swap would be excessive. I would not go above 256mb.
So in QTParted, create at least 5gb of space for your root partition ( I would choose 8gb if possible - allows a little more space for new programs :-) ) Make it a linux file system ( I use Ext3 myself, but Reiser is OK too)
Call that root.
Then your swap space - allocate 128mb or 256mb or whatever. Call it swap.That is given the swap file system.
The rest is your home partition. Call that /home ( note the slash). Again - this can be any Linux fs - I go for Ext3 still - but you may prefer Reiser etc.
Once all the space is allocated, then click on the menu and select to apply it ( cant remember the exact term - confirm or something).
That is all you need to get Yoper running. Then it will continue installing. Don't panic when it gets to the installing software part. If used to other Linuxes, you will be surprised not to see anything other than a black screen with info about taking 5 to 15 minutes. That is normal :-)
If you have a dual boot set up - with Xp especially, you may like to try Grub as your boot loader - it simply works with XP, though I personally prefer Lilo for a straight Linux install.
Hope this helps a bit.
In your post, it mentions no Linux partiton found - are you trying to dual boot?
As for ease of transition from Windows - Yoper is very good. Stuff - such as DVD film playing - simply works :-)
Another good distro if you want Windows like use is Lycoris. But the power of Yoper is way ahead of that.

From what I've been told, a swap space the same size as your RAM was needed in case of emergency where you might need to swap out your entire RAM. Impossible if the swap is smaller than the available RAM.
I tend to let the partitioners set the swap space for me and they always choose a size slightly larger than my RAM size.
That said, I've seen Linux use the swap space only a few times and the RAM is almost always two thirds empty.

A good point - I have never had to use swap in that way - but I can see the point.
I always work on the principle that modern machines - with plenty of ram - are unlikely to use swap space very often these days - except in special circumstances such as heavy compiling.
I suppose its one of those things where everyone has their own views on it - like partitioning in general
I did run knoppix up on a really old Cyrix 300 based machine the other day - with 32mb of ram - that swapped like mad A bit daft of me really - but I needed to know the network card info from the machine and Knoppix was the best idea i came up with!

yupp
these bootable distros are the beesknees for testing pc's
have been using a knoppix one and a suse one at work to test suspect windows machines
"it wont boot"
wanna bet?

lol Yep - I love Knoppix - I have rescued loads of things from Windows machines with it
Yoper were/are working on a bootable version - which would be pretty impressive if it uses the same tweaks as yoper itself.

Thank you all for your comments!

No, no dual boot at this time. And there were two partitions, several times; one a swap, the other a Linux native [ext3]. Next try I'll use one of Tom's Linux boot disks and FDISK & format the partitions beforehand.

The HDD I am using to experiment is only 4.3GB. When I find a distro I like, I'll set up a new 80GB with whatever I choose on it.

I'll try a 500MB swap, and split the rest between /home and root.

I use this PC (which runs 98lite) to test Linux distros on. Everything on it is at least a year old, most more, so any current Linux variant should have no problem with the hardware.

At this point, Xandros is the only distro that correctly identified and set up my SB AWE64 ISA soundcard, and my USR 56K v92 PCI Faxmodem (*not* Winmodem). All others failed to find at least one of them. Linspire 4.5 took a bit of searching to find the modem; never could find the SB...

I have two questions.

1) I am a total Linux newb, and I would like to keep WinXP (NTFS) for now and play around with Yoper. Will qtpart allow me to keep my Windows intact and just create a Linux partition from empty space on my hard drive? If so, how?

2) I have tried to run the Yoper install already, but when it gets to the graphical qtpart, the window appears and i can move the mouse, but then shortly it freezes. It stays like this for quite some time before I eventually turned it off. What is going on?

Thanks for your time. Any help is really appreciated.

OK, armed with all this new knowledge, I was able to use QTPartEd to set up three partitions, one swap, two ext3 Linux, one of which is /home, the other root.

I had to do this twice; the first time, Install aborted because the root was not 3000MB minimum...I set it up at 3001MB, and it went through fine after that...

...The install went fine, anyway...Yoper did not detect my SB AWE64 ISA soundcard, even under legacy devices...It also could not find my modem, a USR 56K V92 PCI internal faxmodem (not WinModem)...I tried manually setting it up but *none* of the device settings worked (Linspire found it at ttS4)...I tried as root, still no detection...

Yoper also incorrectly identified my monitor; it took two tries to get that sorted out...The model number of my IBM G96 was listed, but with a different fascia identifier [G94]...A reboot was necessary...

I rebooted a couple times, to see how quick it loaded...I have to say I'm pretty disappointed, it loads slower than some other distros I've tried...

There was no package selection, either...Everything got installed...Big and bloated...

Not a very satisfying experience...

But I appreciate all the tips and help! Eventually I'll find something I can live with...