Re: FC1 / XP on a dell Inspiron 5150

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On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 16:13, Pierre De Boeck wrote:
> 	Hi all,
> 
> I have just my new Dell inspiron 5150 and installed
> XP and all the MS dev suite (.net,..) on a 25 GB partition of
> my 60GB HDD.
> 
> Now I want to install FC1 in dual boot on the rest (35GB) and
> before to do that, I have a few questions to ask in order to avoid
> to crash my XP installation.
> 
> So my first question concerns partionning in FC1. Is the following
> scheme seems correct:
> /root: 50MB
> /swap: 1GB (I have 512MB DDR)
> /:the rest (about 34GB).
> 
> And particulary the size of the / partition: is it possible to use
> 34GB or I have to limit it to some limit (as I read in RH, about 5GB)?
> 
> Once that issue is solved, I will come back with other questions regarding
> the drivers and kernel recompilation.


Here is what I did on my 5150.

I used Partition Magic 8 (which I already had), to resize the XP
partition to 10 GB. This is enough to provide space for XP and the
pre-installed apps and leaves about 3 GB free. I don't use XP, but I do
lease the laptop. This approach makes it easier for me when time comes
to send it back to Dell, as I will be doing shortly with my old i8200. I
just remove/wipe Linux, edit the XP BOOT.INI file and resize the XP
partition back to its original size.

For Linux, with the remaining space, I did the following:

/boot: 100 MB

/: 15 GB

/home: 30 GB

SWAP: 1 GB

I have 2 GB of RAM and to date, have yet to see more than 15 to 20 MB of
the SWAP space used. I recognize that this is more RAM than you have,
but just to note that I did not use the typical RAM x 2 formula. I
couldn't envision essentially wasting 4 GB of HD space. With 512 MB of
RAM, I would set the SWAP to 1 GB.

I set up a separate /home so that I could format/re-install/upgrade
Linux when and if I need to, without placing my own stuff at risk. It
makes system management easier and will make moving to FC2 easier.

When I installed FC1 (which I had to do in text mode), I used disk druid
to configure the above partitions and formatted them to ext3.  I also
use GRUB (with LBA), which I installed to the /boot partition and not to
the MBR, which enables me to keep the normal XP boot process. I edit the
BOOT.INI file under XP so that it lists FC after having copied a Linux
boot sector over to the XP partition.

The basic process for the above is listed here:

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html

I used the above info on my i8200 over the past couple of years ago for
RH 8.0, 9 and FC1 and then replicated that process on the 5150 for FC1.

I am not sure where you are going with drivers and the kernel, as I did
not have to do anything 'special' to mine, which includes using the
DVD+R/RW. I am using the latest 2.4 kernel, added NTFS read support,
installed the NVidia driver (UXGA panel) and recently loaded up ALSA,
which works well. I also copied the XP TTF fonts over to ~/.fonts to
make them available under Linux.

BTW, I am using XFCE4 as my desktop rather than GNOME or KDE. I also use
Rox as my default file manager along with xterm.

I have not played around with either the built-in modem or WiFi card at
this point, since I haven't needed them yet, but we'll see where that
takes me in the future.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz





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