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
