Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

We are putting together some computers for DOS and linux (with 3 or 4 ISA
slots) each of which will have two hard drives and two sizes of floppy
drive (which means converting one of the power supply plugs since we ran
out of the regular styles unless someone has a better idea).  The two 
drives are so I can have four DOS partitions and more than one linux 
partition (4 per drive).  In DOS, after putting on software, I can resize 
the partitions with partition magic, or add or subtract partitions, 
without losing any data.  I start by defragmenting the partitions so as to 
make free space at the ends of them.

Is this true of linux?  Can I format the entire 1G drive as one ext2 
partition, and then later, with say 300 M of linux files on the drive, can 
I split it into two 500M partitions without messing up linux?   If I 
remove files from linux and then put more files on, do they go into the 
contiguous free space at the end of the partition, as in DOS while there 
is such space, or do they fill in the holes left by removing files?

I might want to use a separate partition for BL1, BL2, BL3, and BL4 or
FreeBSD, for instance.  I have not found any need for a swap partition
since I have 64M RAM.  We have run out of connectors for a third hard 
drive.

How have other basiclinux users ended up partitioning their drives and 
what sorts of operating systems do they have on them?  Would it be better 
to start off with 2 or more partitions and split linux up among them 
(mount them all and if I decide I want to use more than one operating 
system, move all the BL2 files to one partition and unmount the others?).

All ideas on this welcome.

Sindi Keesan