Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, David Lane wrote:

> Sindi,
>   My experience with Linux so far is,what those partitions start out as,stay
> that way,unless you want to reinstall the OS.The Linux file system is very
> flexible and dynamic it seems but it defies being rearranged greatly from
> what I see.
>    The hardrive in my little experimental box,has in essence,three
> partitions.Cylinder zero (yes I go back that far) is the home of the MBR and
> LILO.Cylinder one to one fifty seven is the swap partition.Cylinder one
> fifty eight to nine seventy seven is the OS.
>   You say you don't use a swap partition,there was a time when we thought
> 64MB of RAM was plenty in Windows too.You could make a small,5 to 15 MB boot
> partition,then a partition approximately twice the size of your available
> RAM,that could be used for storage or whatever until the day you need a swap

I did some experimenting and even while running X and Opera, 16M seemed to
be the most that I ever needed, at least nothing bad happened with 16M.  
When would I need more than that?  I don't usually run X at all, just for
Opera once in a while, and even more rarely xpdf or xv, and I can't think
of a situation where I would be using more than one of these at a time.  
I could tell things were going badly when I tried to run BL3 with X in 3M
RAM and no swap file (lots of swapping to disk then a crash) and I have
never had even swapping to disk with BL2 in 16M.

So I am thinking perhaps I could have the first partition for BL1, 128M, 
and if I ever needed a swap partition I could convert it to that.


> partition.The rest of the drive could be the OS.If you ever need the swap
> partition,move the files from it to a directory in the main partition.Then
> boot the PC on the RAM version of BL(1-2-3) and fdisk the swap partition and
> set it as swap,then install LILO or Grub and initialize it.You then reboot
> back to the hardrive and edit your fstab to activate the swap on boot.
>   As for me,I'd put DOS on a separate hardrive with one primary,then as many
> extended partitions as you want,but that's just me.Some BIOS will then let
> you specify which drive is the boot drive as long as they are set to "cable
> select".

Why extended partitions?  I find four partitions (primary) plenty for DOS.

Can you explain what "cable select" is all about?  We find it on the hard 
drives and ignore it.

I was planning to use the DOS drive to boot with, since I will be using
DOS for translation work (can't find a non-gui linux wordprocessor), and
then use loadlin to boot linux from the second drive (and use linux for
anything online, and to view pdf files).  Maybe some day I can get dosemu
running and then worry about boot managers.  Could I then boot from the
second (linux) drive with a boot manager?

>   Whatever you do,I'm curious to see how it turns out,please let us know.
> 
> David Lane
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