Greetings,

I'm a newbie to the linux world so please bare with me as i have a few questions:

1.) I will be installing SuSE 9.1 Personal on a Dell PowerEdge 2300 that has 5 hard drives. I believe, although i'm not totally sure, that the hard drives are about 5GB each. Again, that's a rough approximation. Anyway, i'm still a little bit confused about how the partitioning scheme works in Linux. How do you guys recommend I partition these 5 hard drives? I will NOT be using any type of RAID configuration. I would like to keep the operating system on hard drive 1. Eventually, I'm going to run Apache, MySQL, and PHP and I would like to install those 3 on hard drive 2. Then i would like to use the remaining hard drives for file storage (music, movies, docs, etc.) Can i setup my hard drives this way? What type of file system do i need to make each hard drive (swap, ext2, etc)?

2.) Does SuSE 9.1 Personal come with a VNC server so that i can manage it remotely? I come from a msWindows environment and have always liked realVNC. Can i use this on SuSE too?

3.) Any suggestions on using Apache, MySQL, and PHP on SuSE? I've used them on windows systems so i'm wondering how different they're going to be setting up on a linux system. Any recommendations on whether to install them on a separate hard drive (i have 5 of them!)?

Thanks for your time,

*Nick*

Only 5GB each? Enable and use the hardware RAID - preferably RAID5, which will give you ~20GB worth of usable space, and just define one partition for /, and maybe a 512MB to 1GB partition for swap. I know you said you won't be using RAID but if all you have is those 5GB drives, make things easy on yourself and go RAID -- or upgrade one or more of the drives.

It does provide VNC however if you have an X client on Windows you could always just use that to manage the Linux box remotely - it's a more pleasant experience since VNC tends to lag a little when you're not on the LAN.

1. Apache, MySQL, and PHP work far better on Linux because on Linux you can use ALL the PHP calls, where on Windows you can only use a subset of PHP (unless you go really wild with Cygwin cross-compiling everything you need).

2. Enable and use the hardware RAID - you'll drive yourself batty otherwise. Or, upgrade one or more of the drives.

what he said

The remote desktop sharing functionality uses the VNC protocol - although it's not flawless (don't know whether it's implementation of VNC 3.3 compared to me using VNC4 on the other machine is affecting that though). Try experimenting with that - make sure you update your firewall settings accordingly.