Dual Boot Partition windows(NTFS/FAT32 ?); Linux (ext3/ext2)

[godblessedson]

Dear Friends

I am installing dual boot Windows XP and Fedora Cora/Gentoo 64 bit on 80 GB SATA. I have space restriction of 55 GB for Windows + 25 GB Linux.

1. Kindly tell me the partition summary for the Same.

2. What should be file system kept for Windows NTFS/FAT32 ?

3. What should be file system for Linux ext3/ext2 ?

Whats the difference anyway in these file systems.

4. Which is better to go for Gentoo or Fedora Core (only these two detect my SATA hard disk)?

5. Shall I keep Swap space around 1024 MB for my 512 MB physical RAM?

Thanks

[ujjwal]

Linux systems can use many different file systems, of which ext2/3 are very popular. ext3 is a version of ext2 with journalling capabilities, that means that the data transfers are logged in a journal, such that in case anything goes wrong due to a power failure or something else, the journal can be checked for information about what was left unfinished. On journalled filesystems, you don't need to run the long fsck process every improper shutdown. There are other journalled filesystems like reiserfs, but this is not natively supported by fedora (AFAIK), but it is faster than ext3 and will be a good choice if you have the option.

For Windows you should keep NTFS partitions for your primary partitions, but keep one FAT32 partition, which is writable within linux.

And as for gentoo vs fedora, they are pretty different types, anyway go for fedora if this is the first time you are trying out linux, and prefer ease of use over the extra speed and power of gentoo. Gentoo if you don't mind compiling all software from source.

[godblessedson]

Thanks for reply.

can you just give me partition table summary for same. Shall 1024 MB swap space be enabled?

[ujjwal]

Generally a single root "/" partition is sufficient for holding the linux distro, plus a swap partition for those without lots of RAM. But some distributions recommend a seperate /boot partition of about 30 to 50MB, which would hold the kernel and other things related to starting up the system. You could even have a seperate /home partition for keeping the user's personal files seperate, a seperate /var for preventing fragmentation in the main partition, and so on. But for starting out, the distro's defaults or a single / partition will be fine

And as for the swap size, 1024 MB is too large, you will never need so much, infact, you could do without swap if you don't use too many heavy applications, but just in case you can probably use around 256 MB