Does Red Hat Linux (Shrike) allow a partionless install? If yes how does one go about it. I had succeeded with a loopback filesystem with Red Hat 7.

I have searched google and the Redhat Manuals and website but found no specific instructions for Red Hat 9 mentioned anywhere. Any help would be appreciated. If RH9 doesn't allow it, can you suggest a latest distro that does?

Thanks,
HornOkPlease 8-)

You will probably need at least one main partition, and a swap partition.

As jamie said, you'll need a swap partition to install, don't really understand why or what its for but RH9 needs it.
(swap doesn't need to be that big either, the more space you have on your HD then the more space you can give it. Helps linux run better.)
I have RH9 and got it work fine, but I have a swap partition.
Hope this helps

Hi Jamie,Umbrella,

Thanks for taking time to reply to my query. But what I was really asking was if RH9 allows a install on a FAT32 partition like RH7.

In this kind of install you specify the / fs on your Dos partition itself in Disk Druid during install. The entire OS is installed to a file (with a separate file for swap) on your DOS partition and a loopback filesystem is used. To boot into linux you need a boot floppy disk since the mbr isn't changed and LILO isn't installed. You can see the partition where linux is installed from windows too since it is still a dos partition.

In RH7 the partitionless install was properly documented in the Appendix but it isn't so here. Hence i was wondering if it was still possible and if anyone had tried it.

I will just do it the usual way creating proper linux partitions for RH9.

Thanks anyway :-)

umbrella: the swap partition is used as cache (temporary memory storage) and I think should be twice the size of the amount of RAM in your computer. That is why it improves the performance