Who wants to answer a nice little newbie's questions?

[aysiu]

Thanks guys! So what exactly is a 'swap' partition, and how big should it be in relation to the other partitions? And 'home' is yet another partition Linux requires?

Seriously, read the first link in my sig. If you have questions after that, I promise I'll answer them.

[ceal105]

yes! knuckles...

let me explain again....

/ ----> is the parent directory of linux file system...

inside "/" you will find several folders like: var, usr, home, bin, etc.....

when you monut a partition as "/" you are mounting the whole system on that partition... ok?

im telling you to do that but put the folder "/home" in his own FAT32 partition... so windows will be able to see it (probably as drive D:\ on My PC) and yes... anaconda installer of fedora should guide you trought the process...

pd: you should really look a the first link on aysius signature...

[ceal105]

look i found this image of an installation with the partitioning process

this guy made a partition for / another for /var and another for /home...

this is not the fedora installer but its just to have an idea of the partitioning thing...

i hope you understand...

http://www.linuxplanet.com/graphics/..._partition.png

[drtvasudevan]

well...having bumbled thriough several installs....

1.you can install multiple versions of linux and run them to see what you like or comfortable with.
2. one swap partition for all the distros is enough.
3. for each distro one / partition of about 4G and a home partition for the files is ok.
4.if installing more than one linux distro, then install the bootloaders in their own partitions and use a third party boot manager to boot from.
otherwise a lot of problems can be assured.
5.enter the instal by typing expert but chose all the default values. this way you learn what is happening but have a little more control on the process.
6 swap is equivalent to the virtual memory of winxp.
7. i vote for ubuntu.


BOL

tv