I have a new machine on order. The more interesting items are: Mobo: Gigabyte 7VA KT400 + Sound/AGP8X/DDR400 AMD Athlon XP 2000Mhz ATI Radeon 7500 64B/Dual Head UDMA 40Gig 7200RPM My first question is will I have any difficulty with these hardware pieces? My second question is about partitioning for a dual boot with Windows 2000. I need the Windows system, at least for now, for work purposes. I also may want to store images in a shareable location and I presently have 5Gigs of digital pictures on this Win 2K machine. My thoughts are to set up: 10G Windows 2K system and software 10G Shareable data (FAT?) For the rest, however, I am uncertain. The machine has 256M DDR and I have 512M more coming so I plan to make a 768M swap partition. Beyond that, the web pages I have found discuss mostly minimums for / /usr /tmp and /home. Ialso read that more than 6Gig can create problems for ext2 partitions. So atthis point, I'm between those minimums and 6Gig. :) This machine is a desktop for home/professional use (I am a web developer). Any advice is appreciated. I am a newbie, so feel free to explain to me things that may be patently obvious to everyone else and feel free to write me offline in the event that the subject matter may not be of interest to the list.
Wierd, aside from HD and graphics, that's almost the same config that I've just been playing with (I have a Gigabyte KT600 as opposed to the 400 you have). Woody installed fine, though X wouldn't recognise my graphics case which is a GF2 MX. For playing purposes I got hold of the Sarge boot CD and using the partitions I setup from the Woody install I got Sarge going and everything worked amazingly well including the video card. KDE ran fine with no hassles, and the system appeared stable with no locks, hangs, crashes etc. I guess the kernel in Sarge is better for newer hardware since with Woody Debian couldn't fully handle my motherboards power management as I always had to shut the machine down manually after running shutdown -h now. Still, a kernel upgrade with apt may help this, and updating to the newest release of XFree may help with the graphics.
I've had ext2 running on massive partitions in the region of 60GB upwards. Only thing with ext2 is that if the system doesn't shutdown correctly it will scan the drives for errors on the re-boot which can take AGES with larger partitions.
Give it a go. If it doesn't work try again! If you're new to Debian (like me!) then it's way different to install than say Red Hat or Suse but I'm growing to like Debian more than these very quickly!
Hope this helps, Regards, nry _________________________________________________________________It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today! http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger