On Tue, Jan 30, 2001 at 02:03:44PM -0000, manager wrote:

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A couple of questions, 1) Is there a sensible upper limit to the size of the swap partition?

Dell using red hat 7 suggest 512Mb. Suse used to say double the Ram up to 128Mb

Double your RAM is the usual benchmark.

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2) Will LINUX use what's offered or use the space only if required - i.e. does it try to be efficient?

Yes and Yes. Again that's in the Suse manual.

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3) When trying to squeeze LINUX into a m/c with several small HDD's I found that a maximum of 4 partitions per drive was allowed. Is there a reason for this? (cant remember every trying to add more than 3 partitions in the past! DOS or LINUX)

Yes. Wintel. Basically, you are allowed 4 basic partitions per drive one main and three extended.

<snip> That's right - 4 primary partitions. In extended partitions you can create what are called in the dos world logical partitions. Hopefully the following will give you an idea of what you can do (although far from perfect): # /sbin/fdisk -l /dev/hda Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 784 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 131 1052226 6 FAT16 /dev/hda2 132 148 136552+ 82 Linux swap /dev/hda3 149 181 265072+ 83 Linux /dev/hda4 182 784 4843597+ 5 Extended /dev/hda5 182 443 2104483+ 83 Linux /dev/hda6 444 574 1052226 83 Linux /dev/hda7 575 784 1686793+ 83 Linux On my machine above I have 3 primary partitions hda1-3, an extended partition hda4 containing 3 logical partitions hda5-7. IMO it's worth using fdisk to create the partitions - it seems more logical than the other tools. It's also worth reading the Partition-HOWTO which goes into it and also swap space in some depth. -- Frank *-------*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-------* | Boroughbridge | Tel: 01423 323019 | PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 | *-------*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-----*-------* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/