[thechat] Mandrake Linux

Patti Ames patti at pattiames.com
Tue Jan 29 18:49:00 CST 2002


At 9:57 PM +0000 1/29/02, Kevin Stevens wrote:

>  > I'm guessing your partitions are:
>>
>>     hda0 - /
>>     hda6 - swap space
>
>Yeah, but it seems to have taken 1 Gig as swap space, I was under the
>impression that swap space is supposed to be about twice the size of your
>RAM, of which I have 128 meg. And I am confused as to why it is labeling it
>HDA6 instead of HDA1.

Swap is typically on partition 6. (2 is reserved for "backup".) 1 Gig
is kind of big, but not really really big, so I wouldn't sweat it.
Swap should be "big enough" for your needs - what are you using your
linux box for? Twice your RAM is a general guideline, but definitely
not a hard rule. "it depends" is a theme here...

>The reason I wanted to re-format was to
>set the partition sizes myself and to see if some of the problems I am
>having re-appear. The grep thing mentioned above is one of them, also I
>wrote some code to the bashrc file that should give me a prompt if I try to
>overwrite something (I believe I got this from linux.org), but that isn't
>working either. I am at that horrible newbie stage where I am unsure if it
>is me being stupid or the machine :)

Your swap space and partitioning scheme will not affect your system
usage UNLESS you see 100% full anywhere in    df -k   especially if
it's a partition that contains /, /var, or /tmp. Your swap space just
makes your system somewhat faster if its overloaded - like if you're
using that 128M to run your desktop, a web server, mysql, and ...

try . .bashrc  (that will re-execute the stuff in your .bashrc). grep
blah shouldn't give you a prompt until after you hit ^D.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to partition out your disk... but you
should look up common practices first. :) If your hard drive is
really big, you could stay with just / and swap. But here are some
things to consider: /usr and /home should be big, and / /opt /var and
/tmp should be smallish, since all of your programs go into /usr.
/var is mostly for logs, email, and printing stuff. You don't want /
to be full under any circumstances (makes the computer pissy about
booting), and you never want /tmp to be full (makes the computer
pissy about, um, everything). You won't be able to graphically log in
(KDE, GNOME, or whatever) if /home is full. Partitioning is an art...
and it all depends on what you're going to use the computer for. A
handy reference is
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/partition.html

HTH.



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