LinuxBox/Debian

Quick question... If I'm thinking of doing a Debian installation, any guesses as to how much disk space I should allow for it? - Kazuhiko

: That depends on how much software you want to install. MoonShadow's installation currently weighs about 2Gb. Dave's copy of /RedHat? with everything except development packages and sources weighs 3.5Gb.

I have two installs (with shared home directories etc) in 7GB on the laptop, and I've got a reasonable ammount of space left, and CivCTP installed. -- Senji

Partitioning discussion moved to /Partitioning

OK then... How about this for my Debian install then:

swap - 360Mb
/ - 400Mb
/usr - 5Gb
/home - 5Gb

: Looks good to MoonShadow..

These will all be on the same physical drive, is that going to cause a problem?

: Nope.

I will have a fair amount of vid files lying around which is the reason for the size of the /home area. Would I be better off making this another partition?

: Don't see why.

Since I'm new to this, I will probably install a lot of stuff I might not actually need so I would rather over than under estimate. Aside from anything else, trying to up the size of a partition sounds extrememly painful.

Oh, the disk itself is 20Gb. The remainder of the space will either go back to NTFS for XP or possibly to FAT (FAT32?) to try to act as a bridge between the two systems.

I'm planning on using the Sarge netinst installer and, if that fails, the Woody netinst CD that MoonShadow gave me and then shift to 'testing' (if I can work out how...). Is the partitioning part of the install likely to be easily understandable or not? I've used the Windows installer partitioning program a number of times, but not any others.

: Partitioning during Woody installation uses "Disk Druid" - a menu-based partitioning thingy. No idea what Sarge uses. The one scary question it'll ask you is the starting cylinder number of each partition - IIRC, it defaults to the start of the largest area of unpartitioned space on the drive, so just accepting the default value should get you the result you want. Machines with an old BIOS have a problem with the root partition not being in the first 500Mb or so of the hard disk, and it'll warn you about that; just ignore it :) Nothing is written to the disk until you quit Disk Druid and tell the installer it's OK to write stuff - so if you mess up, just delete what you've done so far and start over (or hit reset if it's really bad :) ) - MoonShadow

Umm... Anything else I should be aware of? Magic command line incantations? Just at the moment, if its not something I can find by experimenting with a GUI (I think I've decided to use KDE to start with) then I probably won't be doing it (unless someone here tells me of course)...

 - Kazuhiko

: Once you get over the partitioning hurdle, you should get something that works and is fixable even if you just blindly tap "enter" to all the other questions; it's probably better to ask about specific things as you encounter them from there.. Oh, it'll ask you whether to put LILO in the MBR of /dev/hda, or in the boot sector of the partition / is on - you want it in the MBR unless you are planning to hack the Windows XP loader to have an option to load Linux for you (which involves editing c:\boot.ini, IIRC). - MoonShadow