My daughter has a Dell CP233ST, 3Gig HD and Win95. She will be going to university to study physics later in the year and appreciates that a linux dual boot PC will be a valuable asset. I have started to prep the machine ready for a Slackware install but am now starting to question myself as to whether I should tweak things a bit before I dive in?

This is what I have so far:

hda1 960Mb win95
hda5 100Mb FAT16
hda6 300Mb /home
hda7 130Mb /swap
hda8 1.5Gig /

Plus there is a 35Mb non-dos partition at the end of the drive that I believe has something to to with apm. I have simply left that there.

My slight concern is that I only have one primary partition and that belongs to windows. The fact that I'll be booting from hda8, and that is a logical partition niggles me slightly. Should I delete this partition and recreate it as hda2 or is that really unnecesssary?

Many thanks.

No, Linux doesn't mind at all booting or running swap from a logical partition. That really looks like a pretty good partitioning scheme for what you have there, very similar to what I use on a Compaq laptop with a 1.3GB HD that dual boots win98 and Slack. You might want to have a look at my minimal install guide to optomize your installation. There's a neat trick there too, called KILL BILL, so you can boot your Linux by clicking an icon on your Windows desktop.
If anything, your separate FAT might be made a little bigger as a good area to swap data from win to linux. If you have at least 32-64MB memory you could probably use less swap area. Also a swapFILE can be setup on a FAT partition instead of using a regular swap partition.
Also a good idea to clean up /etc/rc.d/ and /etc/inetd.conf. I usually edit /etc/inittab also to turn of 4 of the 6 gettys- saves resources also.
http://home.earthlink.net/~gnashley/...ix8_1howto.htm

Fantastic

Thanks for all those tips.