Chris Drane and I have embarked on an experiment, we have installed a 40 gigabyte hard drive in my computer, in order to accommodate a number of Linux distributions.
We would like to know what is the optimum size for one Linux distribution, as the Mandrake I have currently installed takes up a little over 2 gigabytes, (in a 5.5 gigabyte partition), how much more space do they needed over the the actual programme itself?
There would also seem to a problem with the rest of my rather elderly computer recognising the whole of the 40 gigabytes, it seems to be able to `see' only 33 gigabytes of the new disk. Some opinions hold that when divided into separate drives it will be able to `see' the 40 gigabytes, whilst others hold that the rest of its innards need upgrading to be able to recognise the whole 40 gigabytes.
I would welcome suggestions as what to try out in this new found space, I have an ambition to have an installation of Debian, installed by hand and up and running as a long term project, (I've got to learn how to work Mandrake 8 as yet), I've got Red Hat 7.1, (which I found rather `buggy', before I changed to Mandrake). Time is no problem as I retired early. Slackware 8 looks interesting, Progeny would lead in to Debian, and perhaps BSD for the challenge? Divided into 5 gigabyte chunks I would seem to have room for at least 6, and maybe 8 distributions if we can overcome this 33/40 problem.
John Seago, (attempting things well beyond his capabilities)
On 15 Aug 2001 08:41:44 -0400, John Seago wrote:
We would like to know what is the optimum size for one Linux distribution, as the Mandrake I have currently installed takes up a little over 2 gigabytes, (in a 5.5 gigabyte partition), how much more space do they needed over the the actual programme itself?
How long is a bit of string? The amount of space needed depends heavily on what it is you're doing with the machine. I've got a debian firewall using 300mb of a 2gb drive... but a debian desktop machine using every spare byte of 4gb... a debian server that has cheerfully chewed through the best part of 40gb...
There would also seem to a problem with the rest of my rather elderly computer recognising the whole of the 40 gigabytes, it seems to be able to `see' only 33 gigabytes of the new disk.
I've got a P133 that's able to see the entire partition of a 34gb disk (only one partition on there). It has to be slave though, as it's linux that can see the disk and not the machine itself (I can't boot off it).
Good luck with the experiment, anyway,
Andrew.
On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, John Seago wrote:
There would also seem to a problem with the rest of my rather elderly computer recognising the whole of the 40 gigabytes, it seems to be able to `see' only 33 gigabytes of the new disk. Some opinions hold that when divided into separate drives it will be able to `see' the 40 gigabytes, whilst others hold that the rest of its innards need upgrading to be able to recognise the whole 40 gigabytes.
this sounds like a BIOS problem, how old is the motherboard? you may be able to get a BIOS update so you can "see" the rest of the disk or you may have to fiddle around with the hard-disk parameters in the BIOS. Unless you overcome this it is very (read not) unlikely that you will see the last 7Gb.
As for how many distros can you get on 1 disk, I once did an experiment with a friend and a 4Gb disk, we managed to install in no particular order
MS-DOS 6.2 Win3.11 Win 95 Win NT (server & workstation) Solaris 7 Netware 5 Redhat 5.2 (or maybe 6.0) SuSE 6.1 Debian 2.1 one of the BSDs Beos 3
and possibly some others that have slipped my mind. the most fun part of this experiment was working out which order you had to install things in as making sure that one OS didn't overwrite another OSs bootloader.
Now I make that at least 11 operating systems, so I challenge you to put around 110 on your new disk with minimum repetitions ;-)
Adam
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Adam Bower -
Andrew John Savory -
John Seago