Elslamo alikom every body
Thanks god i have now a new laptop its hard is 160G
Really i want to make a complete transfer to Linux
So i decided to make the partitions as follows :
/ : 10G for Slackware
/ : 10G anthre partion for Fedora or CentOS
/home : 140G
I am not satisfied with those partitions
If any body can help me and give me a good advice
First i will put Slackware and Fedora or Centos because most electronics programs support RedHat Enterprise therfore i should use on of them
and i will make virutal machine and install Window$ on it if i am forced to use them
I think that will help me to make a complete conversion to Linux
Or shall i make a Windows partition ??
Is there any advice that can help me ??

Hello,

If you already have a computer with MS-Windows installed, then I would suggest to use your new laptop exclusively for Linux. This way you'll really feel like you moved to Linux and can always fall back to MS-Windows if you urgently need something that Linux can not provide (although I'm hard pressed to identify one such example).

Regarding partitioning of your laptop, I would suggest that you use Logical Volumes (LV) to manage your various partitions.

On big advantage of LV is that you can easily resize them so that if your intitial partition scheme is not satisfactory you can always change it.

Refer to http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackwar...README_LVM.TXT on Slackware first CD for how to install Slackware on LV.

For a detailed description of what LVM is and how it works, see lvm

If you use LVM, your HD partitioning (using fdisk for example) could be as simple as:

1st primary partition: Linux Swap (code 82)
2nd primary partition: Linux LMV (code 8e)

Hello Ahmed,

If you don't mind a little less speed using Windows in a virtual machine, why not. With Slackware you could use VirtualBox; you will find SlackBuilds for it at slackbuilds.org

I don't see anything wrong in having the same /home for both Linux distributions. Only take care of some applications settings which could differ if you use the same application with both system, especially if you don't use the same version on both.

Thanx for the reply
then swap and / i is that enough
think i should make /home /media ,.........
in another partition ?
and what about the the other dist. (centos or fedora) is that safe to make 2 "/"
and my laptop is 64 bit and i searched on the net and i found that slackware doesn't support 64 bit

Hello Ahmed,

It's perfectly safe to create 2 or more "/" partitions as long as only one is used at once (the others can still be mounted in /mnt for example).

I mentioned earlier Logical Volumes. With LV, you just need to partition your physical HD into 2 partitions: swap and Linux LVM partition.

Then you will create in the physical partition of type "Linux LVM" the Logical partitions "/" "/home" etc...

With LV you are not limited in the number of logical volumes (i.e. partition) to be created. You have to keep in mind that your HD partitioning can not have more than 4 primary partitions (after that you need to use extended partitions).

If you're interested, please read the documentation I mentioned in my previous post.

By the way, I personally would not share the same /home for 3 distributions. The reason is that distributions may use different versions of a software and these different versions may populate differently your user home directory with incompatible configuration files (ex: Mozilla Firefox).

I would rather suggest to create a common partition just for your data (spreadsheets, video, music, word documents...).

To resume if you can to install Slackware, CentOs and Fedora, you could have the following partitions (physical or logical as you please):

"/" for Slackware
"/" for CentOs
"/" for Fedora
"data" to be used by all of them (this partition will be mounted on /home/<user>/data)

and you have reached the limit of 4 primary partitions on your HD

Judging your skill level from the posts you made in the past (please take no offense) I think it would be wise to stay away from using LVM. It adds complexity in the installation of your operating systems. Only use LVM if you are confident that you know how to handle LVM Logical Volumes.

You can stick to your original plan and have two 10GB partitions for two different Linux distros (but my advice would be to have at least 15GB for each distro's root partition instead of 10GB), create a third "primary" partition for SWAP (make that partition a little bit bigger than the amount of RAM you have in the laptop and you will be able to "hibernate" your computer) and then use the rest of the disk to create an "extended" partition.

In the extended partition you can create the logical partition which will become your /home partition. Using an extended/logical partition gives you the freedom to change the number of partitions if in future you need an extra one - just shrink the /home partition and create an extra partition in the freed-up space.

You can use the /home partition for both Linux distros. Just make sure that the installation program of the second distro does not re-format that partition after you have prepared it for use with the first distro you have installed! There is one thing to be aware of: you may think it is nice to have one account and one homedirectory for the two distros, but because of differences in the distros, the application preferences which are stored in your homedirectory may be incompatible from distro to distro. So, try to give the user account a separate homedirectory on each distro you install to prevent "distro pollution".

If you want Windows you can install QEMU, or Virtualbox, or VMware on your Linux computer and install Windows into a virtual machine. Sounds like your CPU is powerful enough to give that virtual Windows enough speed.

Your remark about Slackware and 64bit: you do not need a 64bit OS on a 64bit CPU. The 32bit Slackware will run just as happily. Generally there will be a couple of percents of speed gain when you install a 64bit OS (speed compared to a 32bits version of the same). Applications that are computationally heavy (like the encoding of movies using ffmpeg or mencoder) will run significantly faster on 64bits.
Slackware will have an official 64bit release someday, I think that much is certain. No idea how soon that happens.

Eric

Thanx all for the help
I have a little question
1-i install alot of programs like Matlab , Xilinx all these programs take alot of space
each one may be installed in about 4.5G or 5G
that makes me thing to make anther partition for progam installation ispite of installing then in / or /home
And i think to make / primary and swap , /home , /programs in a extended partition
Whats ur idea

Hi Ahmed,

I'm running Slackware and Bluewhite64 on a laptop as dualboot with the following partitions:
1. Partition Primary / for Slackware 25GB
2. Partition Primary / for Bluewhite64 25GB
3. Partition Primary /usr/local/public for both systems 60GB (data which I often use)
4. Partition Extended
5. Partition logical 8GB swap for both systems
6. Partition logical /home for Slackware 12GB
7. Partition logical /home for Bluewhite64 12GB

and since I have a 320GB disk, there is much free space for more partitions when I need them for other distros or more Data. You can change mountpoints for your filesystem if needed, you only have to change the entries in /etc/fstab.
To your question about a separate partition for programms: if necessary, you can mount a partition in every point of the filesystem. E.g. if / gets too small and you need space in /usr/share then you may create a new partition and mount /usr/share in that partition. Linux is very flexible in that point.

Markus

If *I* had 160GB, and wanted to install three operating systems, I would probably do:

/dev/sda1 30GB FAT32 Windows
/dev/sda2 15GB EXT3 Slackware
/dev/sda3 15GB EXT3 fedora/centos
/dev/sda4 100GB Extended
/dev/sda5 2GB linux-swap swap
/dev/sda6 98GB EXT3 home

So you could easily read/write your Windows partition under your Linuxes, and have room to install Visual Studio and ioquake3 15GB for the Linux systems gives you headroom for your Matlab and Netbeans or whatnot. Then the 98GB gives you some nice room for movies and tunes and such.

You probably need to take care and do some bootloader magic to make sure that the Fedora loads with the right userland, and so does Slack.

Another idea is to have a 400MB boot partition to put all the kernels and initrd's on, but that's even more complicated.

I am not going to try to sway you either way on keeping Windows, but really every once in a while a spontaneous lan fest happens, and it's nice to be able to install a Winders game real quick

Thanks all for that help
I really appreciate it
I began to feel that 160G is not sufficient
I have a little questions
1-What is the best for 64 bit laptop Centos 5 or Fedora 10 ?
2-Does the program running on RHEL 5 can run on Fedora 10 with out any problems??

Hello Ahmed,

it will be sufficient, just try it.
Just try it. With a little experience a complete installation takes about 20 minutes.
Yes

Markus

Excuse me , are u talking about Fedora or CentOS??

here is my laptop specifications
http://www.laptopshop.co.uk/Compaq_H...ication,n4.htm
I hope to find 64 bit linux suitable for it

Thanks all for the help
I installed my fedora and had problem with sound and my cam
I tried ubuntu and it said error while installing in a buffer (forget about it )
I should now try installing slackware but i am afraid it will not work probably
and shall i try Slackware 12.2 or 12.1 ?
i have installed some of my programs that are compatible with redhat and they worked well(they were old programs such as matlab 7.1)
i had read the readme of some programs it said compatible with redhat 7.1 ,redhat enterprise 1,2,3,4(something Mentor Graphics programs )
but they are new programs ,shall they work good on Slackware or shall i work with fedora ??

Almost anything that works on 12.1 should work on 12.2, too.