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Comments and suggestions concerning this book should be mailed to gmourani@videotron.ca © Copyright 1999-2000 Gerhard Mourani and Open Network Architecture ® 21 The Next Letter – This letter indicates which device the partition is on. For example, “/dev/hda” (the first IDE hard disk) and “/dev/hdb” (the second IDE disk). Keep this information in mind, it will make things easier to understand when you’re setting up the partitions Linux requires. A swap partition Swap partition is used to support vi rtual memory. If your computer has 16 MB of RAM or less, you must create a swap partition. Even if you have more memory, a swap partition is still recommended. The minimum size of your swap partition should be equal to your computer’s RAM or 16 MB (whichever is larger). The largest useable swap partition is roughly 1 GB, (since 2.2 kernel, 1 GB swap file are supported) so making a swap partition larger than that will result in wasted space. Note, however, that you can create and use more than one swap partition (although this is usually only necessary for very large server installations). NOTE: Try to put your swap partitions near the beginning of your drive. The beginning of the drive is physically located on the outer portion of the cylinder, so the read/write head can cover much more ground per revolution. Now as an example: To make the partitions listed bellow on your system (this is the partition we’ll need for our server installation); the command will be under Disk Druid: Add Mount Point: /boot our /boot directory. Size (Megs): 5 Partition Type: Linux Native Ok Add Mount Point: /usr our /usr directory. Size (Megs): 1000 Partition Type: Linux Native Ok Add Mount Point: /home our /home directory. Size (Megs): 500 Partition Type: Linux Native Ok Add Mount Point: /chroot our /chroot directory. Size (Megs): 400 Partition Type: Linux Native Ok Add Mount Point: /cache our /cache directory. Size (Megs): 400 Partition Type: Linux Native Ok Add Mount Point: /var our /var directory. Size (Megs): 200 Partition Type: Linux Native Ok Add