[Gllug] Help with Red Hat 8.0 install on Win 98

[Stephen Harker]

On Tuesday 15 July 2003 10:01, Robert Boulter wrote:
> Hi,
>   I'm new to all this.  Is there any other way of participating in a
> mailing list without using your email address?  

No. The previous emails were talking about the use of a real street address 
being posted to a public list not an email address. Don't worry about it.

> On the technical front are
> you suggesting I put /swap and /. on the freed up partition.  What is /. as
> opposed to /

A couple of things.

/ is the root partition of your Linux filesystem.

/. is shorthand for SlashDot, a popular geek website (/ slash . dot)
	see http://slashdot.org

Now.

Assuming you have your (80GB?) windows partition at the beginning of your 
disk, the extra space at the end (forget about calling it D: as Windows won't 
ever recognise it once you've used it for Linux) can be split up into a swap 
partition and a / (root) partition. Disk druid should be able to do this.

Where it might be complainig about creating a boot partition is because on 
older machines, LILO (the Linux booting program) sometimes wont work properly 
if you're kernel (in / or /boot) is too far down the disk. So the idea is to 
create a small /boot partition at the front of the disk (before your C:) to 
put the kernel in so that LILO can read it properly. This isn't always 
necessary though as someone else pointed out (I think), because on newer 
machines (BIOS's) the full disk is accessible to LILO.

The problem is that you would have to move your C: partition down a bit to 
make room for the small (20MB) /boot partition which disk-druid probably 
can't do (at least not without destroying all your data on C:). That's why 
you would need Partition Magic. Some other distros (Mandrake anyway) CAN move 
these partitions around just fine without losing data.

If I were you, I would ignore the warning about the /boot partition and just 
install without it but make sure you create a boot floppy just in case LILO 
can't boot your Linux partition because you can use the boot floppy instead. 
Once you've booted into Linux, you might be able to install GRUB instead of 
LILO which may be able to boot the kernel directly better than LILO could.

Hope this helps. Let us know how you get on...

SteveH



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