Partitioning

[Pappy]

In my attempt to install Linux I have discovered that by far the hardest part is partitioning my hard drive. I have read extensively about it and it still isn't clear exactly what to do. I have an idea though. I have a 2.5GB drive all of which is partitioned to one big DOS/Windows FAT32 partition. I have about 750MB free at the end of that partition. I will run FIPS (which the documentation seems to think is incredibly risky) and end up with a 1.75GB DOS/Windows partition and a 750MB DOS/Windows partition. Then I will run the Red Hat install program and select custom installation. Then I will go into Disk Druid and delete the 750MB DOS/Windows partition. I'm then not clear on what to do. Some howto sites say create two partitions, and some say three. If I were to create two they would be "/" (Linux native) and another 32MB one (Linux swap). Some guides say to create another "/home" or "/usr" partition. How big should each of these partitions be? I know the Linux swap one will be 32MB since I have that much RAM, but should the "/" partition take up the rest of the space? How about the "/home" partition, should I even have it? Thanks.

[Geoff]

If you're unclear on what to do, just make a swap partition and one "/" partition and it'll work fine. It will be less than optimum but it'll work.

Ideally you'd want separate /usr, /var and /home partitions because it will decrease fragmentation and make things easier to back up (if you're running a server that is).

You have to have a / partition anyway, so anything you don't specify will land up in that partition. Eg if you make /, /usr and /var partitions then your /home directory will be stored under the / partition.

Geoff

[Eccentric]

Here's a step by step using fdisk.
http://www.linuxplanet.com/discussion/Forum3/HTML/000008.html