If anyone can help me I'll greatly appreciate it.

Nowadays I bought a new PC, one HD has win XP in it, I'm going to install SuSE in a secondary HD.

The HD where I will install SuSE has 20 gigs.

I have 512 megs of memory.

I plan on using my PC mainly for gaming and for trying out appz and learning how to use SuSE Linux.

Can anyone tell me how would I ideally partition the HD where I'm going to install SuSE Linux? and the sizes of the partitions??

I already had my system setup unfortunately I couldn't burn CD's using my linux distro, I got an error about a partition not having enough space. Instead of bothering repartitioning the HD I installed a copy of XP in another HD and I'm going to reinstall SuSE in my secondary HD.

I'll greatly appreciate any help!!!!!!!!

I'd go for "/" 11Gb, Swap 1Gb, and "/home" 8Gb. It seems to me a fair compromise, giving you lots of room for installing and trying out extra apps, while still leaving you a fair amount of space for "/home".

I just had a look at my own (opensuse 10.2) setup. I have 6.1Gb of my "/" used - and I have lots of bells and whistles installed because I enjoy learning different programmes. My "/home" has 7.6Gb used space. I also bought an external USB hard drive which I use one half as storage for rarely needed stuff that I want to keep and one half for my regular backup.

If the "/home" partition I suggested (8Gb) becomes too full, an external drive can help you out quite cheaply. I paid mine 100 Swiss Francs for a 40Gb and there were others much bigger for 70 Francs more.

IMHO I would reverse the suggested scheme and keep 8GB for "/" and 11GB for "/home"

for a beginner, making one large / partition and one swap partition should be enough. how big /home needs to be is something only you will be able to judge. start off with one big / as mentioned before (19G) and 1G swap sounds ok (a little too much though as it is not needed in that size anymore, but that does not matter) if in say 6 months you feel unhappy with the partitioning, you can always install again. check the sizes of various directories and make them seperate partitions :-)

Thank you all for your input!!!!!!!!

After much careful thought I decided to try the following, although the last post seemed like the easiest one:

"/" --- 11 gbs
"/home" --- 8 gbs
swap -- 1 gb

Once I get it up and running my first mission will be to learn how to connect my USB HD into my distro and burn CD's to play in my car. I'll probably start raiding all the old threads I find on the subject as soon as I figure out how to search, it's been a while since I've used the newsgroup! LoL

it is damn easy, in windows, free up some empty space (I think 15GB is necessary for current linux), then boot with your Suse CD/DVD, it will do autopartitioning.

2 hdd's are available - there is no need to free up space on the first hdd where windows is installed...

keeping win and lin physically seperate is a pritty good thin - esp for a beginner

Hello world!!! \n

I'm posting this reply from my SuSE Box, here are the actual parameters that I used:

I actually had 19 gigs available instead of 20, go figure.


"/" --- 6 gigs
"/usr" --- 12.3 gigs
"/swp" --- about 700 megs


What I did is just to edit the configuration that the setup suggested during partitioning and changed the sizes to the above.

I had to set "/usr" for as much space as I thought I could spare because that's where most of the software gets installed.

I don't know what's stored in "/", I do know that out of 6 gigs 52% is being currently used so with 3 gigs left I figured that would be enough space for me while I poke around with SuSE Linux to see how it works.

Thank you all for your replies, it was extremely helpful!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you do not need a separate HDD for Linux, what a waste?
just use partition magic to free up 20GB space, then the suse will autodetect and autopartition it into Swap+/+/home.

sure - you would do that - a lot of other would do that too - i would run windows next to linux on one hdd too...
but as i said - for a beginner it is not a bad idea to use a second hdd - just checking posts of users who managed to run some command and ruin all data on that drive (e.g. experimenting with dd on a mounted drive... ) - a separate hdd for a beginner can be pretty usefull - if the person states by himself that he/her wants to use the second hdd - that is even better.
+ if they decide to not want to use linux anymore - they can simply remove the hdd and still have the windows install they were used to without having to muck around with Partition magic trying to get back the lost 20gigs.

besids - this descussion is off-topic.

Just to point this out, I am trying to learn more about linux and make it my main OS. The plan is to use wintendo only and only if the task I'm trying to accomplish is not supported by Linux.

Plus, my college days are over, those times when I survived on coffe and pizza alone are long gone. Nowadays I can afford a second HD so it's definetely NOT a waste. Not only that, but as soon as I feel comfortable with linux I plan on buying a 300 gig HD to use mainly for my linux box, I still have another PC with XP that's piling up dust so everything's all right.

And as I mentioned it before, the "/usr" partition needed more space from the automatic partition that SuSE suggested, I installed most of the stuff I thought I could install without having to worry about security issues. It's all working fine except for an issue here and there which you'll hear about in other threads but other than that everything is A OK, in between, I'm using SuSE 10.1.

Greetings,

Installing Suse 10.2 on 60 gig (hda-ide-0:0).

I am using expert mode.

I will be installing future os(s) (xp/other linux distros).

Here we go...

Partition Layout-

"/" --- 11 gbs
"/home" --- 11 gbs
swap -- 1 gb

-----

Primary (/) (11 gig)
encrypt yes
ext2 or ext3 (want to read from xp if need be)
cylinder size (start/end?)
mount (/boot?) assuming yes

Extended (/home) (11 gig)
encrypt yes
ext2 or ext3 (want to read from xp if need be)
cylinder size (start/end?)
mount (/boot?) assuming yes

Swap (1 gig)
cylinder size (start/end?)
mount (swap) assuming yes

Any input or information is appreciated, :-)

Cheers

pazz33 I would suggest reiserfs but if you wanna read from windows then try the ext3 filesystem then head over and pick up this little program http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html. Xp won't recognize ext2/3 by default it needs a driver "go figure"

Mojojo...

sweet reply, :-D

I will check the proggy out,

I have playing around with ranish with some help from
Trombettworks Multi-boot HowTo
http://www.trombettworks.com/multi-boot.htm.

A great FAQ for anyone new to linux partitioning.

I will post after my install. :-)