what partitions are needed and how you should divide your hard drive

Hello Zoealamode,

Welcome to the forum. To start start off please give clear questions and statements with correct spelling when submitting your posts. It looks as if your asking what partitions are needed and how you should divide your hard drive. That can vary in many ways depending on your hardware setup and the distro of choice. Typically you will have a /boot partition around 50 to 200MB give or take. A SWAP partition usually equal to or twice the amount of system RAM, this may vary as well. Next you need a Root partition (/) as shown in the parentheses, that could very well be the rest of your hard drive space. That is a basic setup. A more complex setup would be the same /boot & SWAP sizes as above and adding different partitions seperate from / like /home, /usr, /var. Like I mentioned earlier it really depends on your particular setup and can vary in a number of ways.

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Only the / partition is essential. Swap can be skipped entirely or set up as a file within /. Everything else can be set up as directories in /.

I always make swap a separate partition and almost never make anything else a separate partition.

Usually most of the size of your Linux partition(s) will be used for your own files. The overhead of installing a Linux distribution is pretty small from any modern disk drive. The actual overhead depends a lot on the Distribution you choose and the options you select. So you haven't given enough info for a useful answer (if you hard drive is small enough that you need to worry about this at all).

Not sure what you're asking. You don't know the size of the hard drive in your computer? The BIOS menus can tell you that. If you boot into a Linux liveCD, the GUI partitioning tool (among others) can also tell you.

The amount of SWAP you need does not have significant correlation with RAM size. It is neither easy nor important to get the SWAP size right. If you need to make a blind guess at a good size with no information, it is better to suggest 2GB swap size regardless of ram size, rather than suggest any formula based on ram size.

Consider a home Linux system with .5GB of ram and 1GB of swap. There is a very good chance that is not enough swap. Compare to a home Linux system with 12GB of ram and 12GB (not even 24GB) of swap. That is almost certainly way more swap space than actually required.

My work computer with 12GB of ram needs significantly more than 24GB of swap. No formula nor blind guess will be close to correct for uncommon uses. But for common uses of Linux, 2GB swap space is very likely a good size.

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Swap has two uses. The computer uses it as an extension of the memory if it runs short, which it not likely to happen if you have 1GB or more. It is also used to store the memory if you hibernate: the computer can then restart by just copying the the data back from swap. So, if you have more than 1GB and don't use the hibernate feature, you can do without swap.

/home is very useful. That will hold all your personal files and the information on how you like your computer and its software configured. Then you can install a new version of your Linux distribution, or a different distribution, overwriting the root partition, and all your data will be unaffected.

Sometimes you are asked by the installer to create a /boot partition. There are technical reasons for this: if your distro asks you to make a /boot partition of a certain size, just do it!

Other partitions (like /var) are used on servers, but you can forget about them.

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if i will make customize linux for server ,it need what partion and , plz tell me more detail about size sowp? thank you .

how i can install kernel 2.6.32 and . how i can compile it , plz tell me command ...thank u :|

I think It would be better to make a new post, and also some more detail on your OS and what you are trying to do.