I've just acquired a 2nd-hand laptop which has Win98 installed in a single 6GB partition (the entire HDD).
THe make and model would help answer a few of these questions
- At present, it seems that the Win98 is set up to look after Virtual
Memory (aka swap space) in its own way ("Dear user, please don't get involved in anything as difficult as this ... just leave it to us"). I seem to recall that Windows uses some sort of "hidden file" for swapping out.
Qs: Will I be treading on any toes on this front by cutting back the disk space to the first 2GB in this way? Or will Win98, next time it starts up, simply do its usual swap thing in the space it then finds available? If there would be problems, what should be done to avoid them?
No, Win9x swaps to a file called c:\windows\win386.swp and will size that to the avaliable disk space, I would also recommend a full wide and reinstall so as to remove any "fetures" that windows devoled under the previous owner
- I want to keep the power-management ("go to sleep" on inactivity
timeout or on pressing the "snooze" button on the machine) available in both Win98 and Linux.
Q: I believe that one of the options is "hibernate to disk", where the system state is saved somewhere on the HDD. This is a similar issue to number 1: what toes would I be treading on?
We much depends on the make of the laptop. IBM's (which I have used for a while) just use a hidden file in a fat32 partition to supend too, where as Toshs suspend to a hidden partition.
Q: There is also a converse issue: If I fail to set up the Linux partitions properly, and the laptop writes its system state out to disk when it wants to sleep, could this overwrite something that shouldn't be overwritten? Again, if there could be problems, what should be done to avoid them?
Yes they can do this, the place to look is google and or linux on laptops (http://www.linux-laptop.net/)