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Hi-
You realize you've got a beta, right? I'm running beta3 and it's fine for me. I'll just give you a look at what I do and you can decide.
I've got / [about 600M], /boot [about 150M], /home [about 2.5G], and /usr [about 2.5G] all formatted in reiserfs plus a /swap which, to be safe, needs to be twice your ram capacity for the current kernel. I like reiserfs as it is more immune to file corruption if a shutdown is not clean and it does not entail periodic, somewhat time-consuming file-checks at boot. If you choose an expert install, you will be able to format in reiserfs, otherwise, I don't think Partition Magic will let you. Linux native [ext2] is not the end of the world for an introduction, either. I heartily recommend you look at the links off LinuxMandrake's home page for hardware compatibility and, especially, the demo and tutorial section, where you get real cool animated walk-throughs of the install process and other tasks.
Making a separate /home partition is about the handiest upgrade to just a single partition as this software changes rapidly and you can save your /home with all your browser preferences, e-mails, documents, etc whenever you upgrade the distro. Mine, as big as it is, is 92% full as I download about 1.3G of Mandrake to it everytime a new version comes out. I keep /usr pretty big as this is where kernel sources go when you want to compile a new kernel. Also, if you install more than one kernel, you probably need about 100M for boot. These are rough and, probably, on the generous side. I keep /usr separate as it filled up on me once and it was a pain to move it to a new, bigger partition.
I've got that modem and all I have to do to get it running is to make a symbolic link, as root:
# ln -s /dev/ttyS4 /dev/modem
where COM5 in windows is ttyS4 in linux, COM2 is ttyS1, etc. Actiontec [at one time] said to change permissions on these devices, which I do for luck: it might or might not be necessary:
# chmod 666 /dev/ttyS4
# chmod 666 /dev/modem
If you install your windows os's first and linux last, Mandrake will install a bootloader (I recommend GRUB, you will have to choose [in expert, at least]) that lets you choose to boot windows or linux. If you install windows last, it will overwrite the master boot record and you will have to use a floppy to get into linux/install the bootloader, so install linux last. There are other ways but this is simplest.
Get familiar, again, with the demo and tutorial links off the L-M home page, MUO doc section [linked there, also], Google Groups for finding solutions to problems, and alt.os.linux.mandrake newsgroup.
Well, that's a start. Good luck.
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Just dl'ed Mandrake Linux 8.1 I need help on installing/setting up. Thanx!
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