Tips & Tricks for Gentoo/XP dual boot laptop?

[TESFox]

I'm going to be getting a laptop soon and am still somewhat of a noob to linux. Just looking for some advice for running a dual boot with gentoo.

I've read the install handbook and have devised this setup:

Use partition magic to shrink xp form 40 gigs to 30
take 5 of the 10 left to fat32 to hold bookmarks, code, mbox'es and such
take the other 5 and break it like this:
1 gig for swap
4 gigs for gentoo and all my software in ext3 or resier fs

Was thinking ext3 because I'm a bit more familiar with it, but reiser because it's better handling small files (like my code, however, it will most likely be on the fat32 drive)

Than proiceed with creating and mounting filesystems according to the handbook. Does this seem viable to anyone? Would there be a better way? I definitely want to use gentoo, and this is my first linux install. Everything I've used so far is live.

Thanks guys!

[zdawg]

1G of swap would be excessive. I'm assuming you have 512Mb of ram and are using the 'double amount of ram>swap' rule of thumb, which was intended for the days when ram was .. scarce. The rest of the plan sounds good though.

[variant]

You are not leaving much space for gentoo either.. bare in mind that to compile java can use several GB of tempory space and portage needs about 3GB to be satisfactory. you should have at least 10GB for gentoo imo. You could get round this problem by holding /usr/portage/ on a seperate system that you can mount when you need to install something (your not likly to be emergeing much while not on the lan unless you have G3 connectivity for your laptop;))

[TESFox]

*nods* That seems like an idea, mabye trim another 5 off Windows and make the linux partition 9 gigs. Or possibily find a smaller distro. Either way...

[kkubasik]

along thes same lines, im trying to install gentoo onto a old desktop with about 5gigs of hd space, i was gonna do 512 of swap, and the rest just one big old ext3 (sine space for an mbr). Should i change something/ will i need a larger drive, or can i make it work.

[TESFox]

Looking over specs, I might use mandrake instead, since it seems to be so much simpler to set up.