You will probably have problems getting X to work if you just use woody, try Sarge (testing) which has a newer version of Xfree and a recent stable kernel 2.4.20 or higher.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?
Partitioning is always difficult to get right first time, one simple rule is to separate the OS and apps from your data (pictures, music, documents, etc). This can be done using a separate /home, this will allow you to change partitions for your OS without affecting your own data. So in your case a basic partitioning scheme would be: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.
10G win2k (fat32 is required if you ever want to safely write to this partition from Linux)
10G fat32 768M Swap 10G Linux (mounted as / ) ~10G Linux (mounted as /home )Unless you start installing all of debian and external programs you shouldn't run out of room on /, you are more likely to fill up /home, at which point you can buy a second hard drive and create a big partition called /opt/archive and move your own data over to that, creating symbolic links where necessary.
For you web pages, you could place them in /var/www (default for apache) or place them in a folder called public_html in the root of your user directory (accessed by http://localhost/~username/ )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. I also read that more than 6Gig can create problems for ext2 partitions. So at this point, I'm between those minimums and 6Gig. :)
Hope this helps Johnny.