Hi,

I am about to embark on my first installation of a GNU/Linux distro and have chosen Slackware. I am going to be installing onto my Dell Latitude D600 Notebook which has one 40GB Hard Drive.

Currently there are two NTFS partitions which are being used by Windows XP and I have 5gigs of unpartitioned space which I have set aside for my Slackware install.

I have a couple questions.

1) I understand that in Linux my partitions will be labeled /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2 etc. My question is then, when I go to use fdisk does this mean that my first Windows partition will be /dev/hda1, my second Windows partition will be /dev/hda2 and that my Linux partitions will start with /dev/hda3?

2) As I said I have 5Gigs to play with. I know I need a SWAP which I will make twice the size of my RAM and I am planning to make /, /home, and /usr/local as reccomended in the Slackbook 2.0. My question is could I get some opinioins on how to use my space? Obviously if I am going to do a Full install I need my / to be at least 2Gigs but what about /home and /usr/local?

Thanks for your help in advance. I'm so excited to dig into this!

1) Yes
2) If this is the first time, just make a swap and a / partition. After you start using Linux you'll realize the sizes for each partition, and also, you could just create another partition and mount it as whatever you want to "append" them once you've Slackware installed.

Not necessarily. That depends upon the type of partitions you create, if they are all primary partitions or if they are logical partitions inside an extended partition. You can create up to four primary partitions and one extended partition on each drive.

/dev/hda1 - first primary partition on first harddisk (in your case first Windows partiton)
/dev/hda2-hda4 - second to fourth primary partition on that drive, only if you create them
/dev/hda5 - first logical partition in extended partition on first harddisk
and so on, from hda5 on there are just more logical partitions

It is possible therefore to partition your drive like this:
hda1: primary partition, Windows
hda5: first logical partition in extended partition, Windows
hda6: second logical partition in extended Partition, Linux
hda7: third ..., Linux swap
...