How to Parbreastions the disk to install FC4 7349

Confidence.

If I recall correctly, the FC4 installation program first gathers information asking you questions, then, when it has all the info it goes ahead to caryy out all the actions, while go for a swim in the local penguin.. er, swimming pool.

Agree, if you computer is less than 5 years old, it is is unlikely to be needed.

This step applies if you already have ahome parbreastion

I will adopt this with the next install I do. No, sooner, because I already have a separatehome parbreastion, and I will do

mvusr-localhome ln -shome-localusr

that is, I will do the reverse, have the separate file system mounted inhome and linkusr-local tohome-local.

(BTW: I never feel confident that "link to" means what it should. I can always imagine the way of thinking that leads to the wrong interpretation.)

1. Backup 2. Backup 3. Backup 4. - 5. Backup.

Get yourself a suitable account somewhere, Yahoo or elsewhere, and upload the most valuable files. I bet you will find the really important ones make up only a few tens or hundreds of megabytes. Burn a CD.

Hard disk are fallible. Murphys law applies to everybody, even to you. I am the *only* exception. No others.

Honestly, I don't know, I have never had the nerve to try it. I really presume "true, it will leave alone your Windows parbreastion", but why trust the guys at RedHat (who are behind the anaconda installer)?

I always choose manual parbreastion, and spend a good stupid half hour figuring out "Should I put the swap parbreastion between the root parbreastion and the home parbreastion. That way it does not have to seek so far.. until I realize that I'm spending more time trying to be "smart" than I could ever hope to save by having a "smart" parbreastioning plan.

You don't need to be as stupid as me, but if you are nervous for the files in your Windows parbreastion, I suggest you just parbreastion the disk manually. I have tried that, and it was easy. (Yes, there was a minor stumbling block in the GUI, I can't remember what it was, but nothing you could loose data with, just that I had to click around a few times not knowing where to proceed, until I happened to click the right place and Ah, there it was.

In that Gui, you specify three things for each parbreastion: how big it will be, how to format it (file system type - chose swap for swap and ext3 for all others), and where to mount it. You can leave it unmounted, and swap cannot be mounted. The program does not carry out any parbreastioning until you are satisfied with the whole setup, and you confirm yes, you want to go ahead.

How big is your disk? I have now used up 10 GB of my 20GB parbreastion. That includes a whole lot of programming tools three or four complete kernel sources and many other things. I think you will easily fill the first 5GB of the parbreastion. Making it much larger than 10GB is probably a waste of space. Your swap parbreastion, make it around 400 MB. People debate such figures. It is a strange thing, you don't want to use it, because it slows down your computer (terribly), but you rather don't want to have too litle of it, because the kernel begins killing processes.

Some say "twice the size of the RAM", but that makes less sense nowadays when people have 500 MB ram. Actually, if you have less RAM, you could needn more swap, not less, but in the end it's the amount of programs that you will be running concurrently that matters. If you run enough to fill 200MB ram + 400MB worth of swap, you are doing something more than casual web browsing and learning Linux. If you do video editing, you will have special demands for both cpu and ram. For most others 400MB is a reasonable number.

The rest of the space - use it forhome orusr-local, throw a dime to decide.

-Enrique