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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

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

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

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

DOS or LINUX)

Yes. Wintel. Basically, you are allowed 4 basic partitions per drive one main and three extended. My own set up is weird! I have a 13Gb hard disc.I dual boot Win 98 and Linux. Because of the 1024 cylinder limit, I wanted /boot under 8GB so... Two partitions 7Gb for Windows to hold all the usual crud, 6Gb as extended. Inside the extended, created two dos drives D 4 Gb and E 2 Gb. Deleted the D Drive leaving me with a 4 Gb area free for Linus running from 7Mb to 11 Mb. Created the usual set of "partitions" /boot /usr /var /temp and swap. Technically these partitions are all subdivisions of the extended partition, so I'm only running 2 partitions. I have one "drive" / volume/ mount point in the main partition which also holds the master boot record. I have 6 "drives" / volumes / mount points in the extended partition where 5 drives are linux based and one is dos based. Roger could probably explain it better. I'm still coming from a DOS background with all the baggage that implies. This e-mail is intended for the addressee shown. It contains information that is confidential and protected from disclosure. Any review, dissemination or use of this transmission or its contents by persons or unauthorized employees of the intended organisations is strictly prohibited. The contents of this email do not necessarily represent the views or policies of East Norfolk Sixth Form College, it's employees or students.

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, manager wrote:

...

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.

Well not so much 'Wintel' as the way PC partition tables work, I think. -- Roger Whittaker SuSE Linux Ltd The Kinetic Centre Theobald Street Borehamwood Herts WD6 4PJ ---------------------- 020 8387 1482 ---------------------- roger@suse-linux.co.uk ----------------------