[vox-tech] Re: Partition question

[Rob Rogers]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 11:29:37PM -0700, Margo Schulter wrote:
> > As long as you aren't planning on running SW and Gentoo at the
> > same time (heh), you only need one swap partition. Nothing is
> > saved from one boot to another, so they can both use the same
> > one.
> 
> Thanks for this tip. I'd like to look into this, and how it would
> affect the installation procedure for the two distros.

It shouldn't really affect either one. I haven't used either of the
distros you're planning on in a while, but I've never seen an installer
have a problem with using an existing swap partition. And like was
mentioned, nothing is saved from one boot to another on the swap
partition, so even if each installer decided to initialize/format the
partition itself during the install, there's no harm done.

> > That doesn't change anything about any of your plans, but I
> > thought you'd like to know. :)
> 
> Actually it might change my plans a bit, because rather than having
> two 768M swap partitions, I could have a single shared 1G partition
> plus a 256M boot partition for each. Your idea is the direction in
> which I'm now leaning -- thanks!

256 is probably much much more than you'll ever need. I'm not sure how
your needs compare to mine, but I've never filled even my 32MB /boot
partition, and I've had over half a dozen custom kernels in there at
once. I've currently got 12MB in there with 2 Debian installed kernels
(2.4.27 and 2.6.7), but both of those include a 4MB+ initrd.img.  For a
kernel you're building yourself, you probably won't exceed about 2MB for
the kernel, and if you do it right, you don't even need an initrd.img.
I'd suggest a max of about 64MB per /boot, otherwise you're just wasting
a lot of space.