hi' i'd like to know your opinion about a SuSE 7.1 installation on a 9.5Gb HDD usable for networking. what about the MBR? i understood that linux can have an empty one and then boot from a prim. partition but on wich of the 3 standard partiotions should this part of data be written down not on the swap partition of course, in the root or the extended partition? but what i realy would like to know is how to achive an empty BMR with linux on the HDD just what is the ideal situation to in install SuSE, eventualy using it as network monitoring OS

When the BIOS boots from harddisk it reads the first part of the harddisk which is the MBR. This doesn't actually belong to any partition. An empty bootrecord is not really possible because there always has to be something there or you won't be able to boot from your harddisk. Most people do like to create three partitions to install linux, for me two partitions work just fine (one for swap and one for the rest). Usually it's best to make sure the swap partition is at least as big as the amount of memory. Most people allocate at least 200MB swap space. The rest you can leave for your root partition. Mik

hi in reply to your awnser, of course i test installed SuSE. like this 1st part. 23.x MB 2nd part. 133.x (the size of my intern mem.) 3rd part. 9.2GB extended partition what for serve's the first patition? and is the swap partition a primary one? thaks in advance cameljockey

The first partition will most likely be your root file system. This contains the kernel and the main file system needed to start linux. I would say 23MB is on the small side but it should be enough for a standard setup. The swap partition is a primary partition. Dos/Windows 9x has two partitions types (primary and extended). The extended partition can be divided into logical drives. Linux just claims a part of the disk as a partition so I guess they would all be classified as a primary partition. Mik

should the first partition also be a primary partition? then what is the right size for a root file sysytem and what size is this anyway. so the kernel (2.1.18/2.40) is installed in first partit. (how do you affect it's source? by just editing or using C/C++.) and what about unix is it used in SuSE if so what version is being used ver. V? thanks for helping me out so far your really great! i'm a novice now but so fanatic that i will join you up quite soon i hope ....(still laking experiance but optimistic) (but no windows for me annymore)

Every partition you make in linux will be a primary partition. Suse itself recommends 80 to 100 MB for the root partition when doing a normal install. And 40 to 60MB when doing a server install. To modify the kernel source you will have to install the src packages. The source code usually gets installed in /usr/src. It is a combination of assembler and C/C++ code. You can edit the code if you know what you are doing but it requires a good programming background. What most people do is just configure the kernel instead of actually modifying the code and then rebuild it. Try reading this doc to find out more about how to do that: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO.html Unix just like linux has many different flavours. I don't no which version V you are referring too. But linux is based off of Unix so most of the commands used in Unix will all be the same in linux. Mik

When the BIOS boots from harddisk it reads the first part of the harddisk which is the MBR. This doesn't actually belong to any partition. An empty bootrecord is not really possible because there always has to be something there or you won't be able to boot from your harddisk. but where is the bootable data of course there is the magic number but further it is empty isn't it?