Following along in the Slackware Linux Essentials book that came with my storebought Slackware 9.0, the partitioning section has me creating the very first partition as the swap partition on /dev/hda1.

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to having the swap as /dev/hda1?

Would it be better as /dev/hda5, or some other mount point?

thanks...

it doesn't really matter, just as long as its on the same hard drive as linux will be.

If you want to be technical its prob best if you can get it on a separate platter than the rest of the system but this is way too much effort.

Alex

the first partition gives a faster seek time. but if you put it in the middle the average access time is about same, so it should be uniform, i guess

Generally when I setup my computer I put my / partition on hda1, then my /home on hda2, followed by /usr on hda3, and my swap as hda4. If you are running windows also, then it generally likes to be hda1 and it erases the master boot record (MBR).

Does it matter where you put your swap? I am gonna say no as long as in your Lilo configuration you do the following:

boot = /dev/hda

This makes LILO look in the master boot record for your boot information. Then you can place Linux in your LILO like this

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda1
label = Slackware

Change /dev/hda1 to whatever you set your root (/) partition to.

Hey, thanks for the quick responses. Looks like hda1 will be ok then. I have 360MB of memory on that machine, so I'll follow 'tradition' and make the swap 720MB. That should be allright up front on the 30 GB disk.

There won't be any Windows on this machine, but I do plan to create an /LFS partition out on the end for Linux From Scratch. And, I think they can 'share' the swap space, so hda1 is as good a place as any.

Thanks again for the responses.

nah don't bother with 720MB swap.

Just have 128-256 odd. Unless you're gonna be doing visciously large amounts of code recompilation or video/graphics editing then you won't need that much.

Just a waste of space.

Alex

P.S. there are heated debates about this all over this board and all over the internet so don't start another one in this thread.

For each operating system, that I use, I prefer to use only one primary partion and several logical partitons. With IDE harddrives there can not be more than 4 primary partitons per harddrive. Of course if one of the primary partitons is replaced with an extended partiton, then many logical partitions can be created within it. Most operating systems can only be booted from a primary partition, not a logical partition. I assume that is probably also true of Linux.

If you use up all of your primary partitions just for that one copy of Linux, I assume it would not be possible to boot any other OS from the harddisk. I use hda1 for DOS, hda2 for Windows and hda3 for booting my 1st copy of LInux. I on my 2d harddrive I can choose between 3 copies of Linux booted from either hdb1, hdb2 or hdb3. I have not decided which Linux distro I like best so I would like to have several installed and compare them. I may also install FreeBSD. I also plan to put Linux from Scratch on either this computer or my old one.

I prefer to put swap and /usr in logical partitons. In the primary partiton I put /boot. If I do not creat a /boot partiton, then I boot from "/" in a primary partiton instead. Of course there is more than one way to do partitioning and these are only my preferences.

I forgot to metion that all the copies of Linux can share the same swap space. At least I have got away with doing that on both of my computers.