Lost at sea

[Stickyrabbit]

I am a really new entry to Linux.

 

I have a really old Red Hat version 2.0

 

Running a P1 with 4 gig hdd

 

and some memory ...I think about 256ram

 

I have delted the windows partition and need to create a new parition. Linux Native?

 

So what are the cylinders and what is "+size" , "+sizeM", "+sizeK"?

What are the recommendations here?

 

Also what is a mount point? How do I specify a mount point?

 

I am really drowning here

[anyweb]

what linux distro are you installing on this ancient hardware ? and what are you hoping that it will do exactly ?

 

cheers

 

anyweb

[z0ny]

I have a really old Red Hat version 2.0

LOL, cool! :) 

I have delted the windows partition and need to create a new parition. Linux Native?

You should create at least three partitions, one for swap (~512MB), one for '/boot' (~32MB) and the rest for your root (/) filesystem. Filesystem types are linux swap for the first one and linux native for the latter ones.

 

So what are the cylinders and what is "+size" , "+sizeM", "+sizeK"?

Well to go not too much into detail (you can google that up if you need more information) harddisks have (several) platters that rotate. Each of these platters are logically divided into tracks which are divided into sectors. The cylinders are the amount of all tracks on all platters. For example if you have a disk with two platters containig ten tracks each you have ten cylinders. Cylinder one contains track one on platter one and track one on platter two. Cylinder two contains track two on platter one and track two ond platter two. And so on... 

In order to create partitions you first tell fdisk where the partition should start (first cylinder; you can always use the default proposal there). The next question is about where the partition should end (last cylinder). fdisk accepts the use of the +size attribute there as most users can't actually refer from cylinder number to partition size (you can calculate that of course). So if you want to create a partition of 32MB size you tell fdisk to use '+32M' as your last cylinder.

 

What are the recommendations here?

I answered that one in my first answer.

 

Also what is a mount point? How do I specify a mount point?

A linux file system is hierarchical (for more information check the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard). Every partitions (and other devices like cdrom, etc.) are mounted to mount points, for example the boot partition (like /dev/hda1) is mounted to the mount point '/boot' and the root filesystem (like /dev/hda3) is mounted to '/'. So generally mount points are (empty) folders that contain the filesystem contents of the mounted devices later on. You might have a look at '/etc/fstab' which contains the filesystem table of your system.

 

Excuse my English but I'm no native speaker. :)