🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3429D258.433C@do.w> shadow <sh@do.w> writes:

[snip]

   machine for logging in to work and game playing. Can a hard drive be
   partitioned to do this, running Win95 on one side an Linux on the other?

[snip]

I would confer with Brian Lowe <lowe@mds.rmit.edu.au>.  It is pretty
straightforward.  I just installed the two for my cousin using RedHat
4.1, so I have a few additional minor details.


About the partitioning:

I like to slice the hard disk a little finer, since it makes it easier
to re-organsie later and protects important installed components from
one another.  The upshot of this is that you require more than the 4
primary partitions, so you will need to plan for an extended
partition.  Also, for RedHat 700M is probably a little too generous.
Here is what we settled on for a 2 GB disk:

  1	extended partition, containing:
	  5	 64 MB Linux root partition, /
	  6	512 MB Linux usr partition, /usr
	  7	 64 MB Linux home partition, /home
	  8	 64 MB Linux swap space (double the installed memory).
  2	256 DOS/Windows primary partition
  3	512 DOS/Windows applications
  4	spare partition

The root partition is the minimum that must be alive to boot the
system, the usr partition is where RedHat installs the bulk of the
software.  Since you are talking about image processing, you would
probably wish a larger home partition, and would need to scale swap to
match your memory.  If you were installing substantial amounts of
additional linux software that was not in the form of RedHat packages
you could mount the spare partition under /usr at say /usr/local, and
install these apart from the rpm managed software.


About the order of installation:

I found to my considerable expense that this is crucial.  First start
the linux installation and partition the hard disk, THEN quit and
install DOS.  Reason: MS will (deliberately?) clobber your lilo boot
loader when it installs win95 (as Brian pointed out --- get those
rescue disks!); also the RedHat 4.1 installation process was made most
difficult by the missing DOS installation.  It seems that RedHat
installation wishes to helpfully install any DOS partition it sees as
a target to boot to.  If the DOS partition has not been installed and
thus has no boot record, the RedHat installation falls over in a very
awkward way, especially for a novice Linux installer!


   Has anyone had any experience doing this? I'm planning to set up a
   simple start menu to switch between the two environments. Thanks in
   advance,

Most Linux users are unfortunate enough to still require both.  I
don't but found the process relatively straightforward.


Cheers,


Andrew
-- 
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