Hi, I'm brand new to Linux and I want to get started now that my computers hard drive crashed yesterday. I bought a 40GB hard drive and I want to use up to half of the drive for win98, and partition the rest for linux. I've had Slackware disks sitting on the shelf for about 6 months waiting for me to get off my a..., so maybe the hard drive crash was a good thing.
*can I make all my partitions using the fdisk utility that came with the slack, or is that just for setting up my linux partitions.
*I've read somewhere that making several Linux partitions can somehow make life easier rather than making one big partition+ a swap. Any suggestions on how I should divide 20 to 30 GB up for Linux?
Many more dumb questions to follow, thanks in advance.

You can make extra partitions for /home and /usr, etc, etc. But with your first installation it might be better just to have:
hda1 - win98/fat32
hda2 - /boot
hda3 - /
- then in your extended partition:
hda4 or 5 - swap
hda6 - shared/win32 that you can mount
At least that's how I have it, and I'm happy as a clam.

Thanks, thats how I will go ahead and do it. How large must each partition be? I'll probably have 20 GB total disk space to divide up for Linux.

hda1 - win98
hda2 - /boot 70mb
hda3 - extended size should be rest of drive.
hda5 - swap 512 mb
hda6 - FAT32 shared If you want
hda7 - / all the rest

the only thing i will comment on, is that you should make your swap double of your ram amount...just a tip :P just in case you have more than 256ram

That was true when you either bought RAM or paid the rent... now it's totally irrelevant.

What's the difference between creating a fat32 shared partition and simply mounting the win98 partition?
(I told you that I have plenty more dumb questions to come)

no real difference, keeps the space seperate, but if it's just win98 then it'll be fat32 anyway, so won't actually matter. more useful if it's xp or nt using ntfs...

and its also true that this is the biggest pile of nothing i have ever read...is this supposed to translate to something with meaning in the english language...

Ok, my goal is to never buy another microsoft operating system so that sounds good. Thanks

Hmm, not a good way to get along here... it's not even a "big" pile of anything...

ok, so if you can't understand that for some reason...

the double ram rule has been around for years and years, first coming around when RAM was extremely expensive for very little reward, so by allocation of around that much swap based on the amount of RAM you had would balance a trade off of speed and total memory. Now many desktop systems have in excess of 1GB of ram, because it's comparatively cheap. Would you suggest a swap partitino of 2GB??? With more than 512mb physical memory you can be hard pushed to use it all up, let alone use up twice as much swap as well. It is simply wasting space. Mind you if you wish to prove that you can personally employ 3GB of memory, you win.

first of what do you mean not a good way to get along, you comment about something i say when we are talking about ram and swap space and you come in and tell me to go pay my rent..seroiusly d00d, do you expect me to understand what you are talkinag about...second off you say the concept was around for many years and yes it was, so it doesn't hurt to tell a guy it...

bliemy, it wasn't an analogy about paying rent, i meant it. ram was VERY expensive, and people couldn't afford it generally.

people also used to burn witches... think that should still be advised? ;-) I presume you're just being delibertalye facetious about these comments, it certainly reads fine.

d00d i am not delibertly being anything, and now that you posted with that explanation, i totally understand what you meant about rent and ram, how you typed it originally, i will guaruntee not 100% of the people understood a damn word you said, actually not even 50% probably understood that, but thats neither here nor there...and you think it reads fine (obviously) cause your wrote the comment, of course it reads fine...but then you had to go along and start talking about witches...no wonder i commented on your oringal post...
and as for the topic itself and back to your original post now that i understand...if it is so irrelevant nowadays, then it sounds like your saying a person shouldn't even need a swap space, is that correct?

it never hurts to have some, but it will rarely get used to any real extent, and often wouldn't be missed.