Which partitioning is required for TCL 3.3 and a PC with a 780MB RAM?

[floppy]

Hello,
for my old boy I created on the 6GB HDD hda (in order to start very quick)
a) boot partition 780MB hda1
b) SWAP partition 10MB hda2
c) standard partition hda3, rest of the 6GB (for home, TCE,..)

I think
a) 780 MB boot partition is too much; TCL is maximum 50MB currently, so 60MB should be enough. Correct?
b) SWAP is probably not necessary at all or this is good for the system to have a part on the HDD?: the RAM 780MB with the AMD K6-2 450MHz is already a lot in order to keep a speed, SWAP will not help the PC.. only small extensions in order to keep a speed
c) the nearly 6GB will be really enough for the extensions, which i must keep small due to the low specification of the PC

Can somebody confirm and/or comment? Thanks a lot.

Pascal

[gerald_clark]

You definitely want swap.
I use 2 partitions.
512M hda1 for swap
The rest as hda2.

I use boot option tce=hda2
I also put grub, bzImage and tinycore.gz on hda2.

[tinypoodle]

If the only purpose of use of the hdd is running TC, I don't see a need of having more than one partition.
A separate boot partition is not required for TC, and neither is a swap partition, as with kernel 2.6 using swap files does not result in any inferior performance (as it would have done before), so you could always be flexible and change size of swap file(s) according to needs coming up.
You could use 'swapfile' tool in TC base.

Umm, 10MB of swap on a 780MB RAM box would increase virtual memory by less than 1.3%, not sure if that would ever make a big difference... Getting a flashback to when I was using swap on a floppy on a 256MB box without a hdd  

[Guy]

It is interesting, different people do it different ways.

I would make hda1 5.5 gb for boot, tce, home, etc. and the rest for swap.

[gerald_clark]

The swap partition has the advantage that it is automatically found and activated.

As far as no need to partition, what bootloader will boot a hard disk with no partitions?
( I am not referring to USB here ).

[curaga]

Whether 780mb without swap is enough depends on what you want to do. Running a couple of OpenOffice docs or 20 youtube tabs will need swap, but for other uses that much ram will suffice just fine.

Heck, you could even load the extensions to ram and enjoy the speed. Swap is recommended though, just as a backup.

[tinypoodle]

The swap partition has the advantage that it is automatically found and activated.

As far as no need to partition, what bootloader will boot a hard disk with no partitions?
( I am not referring to USB here ).

Oops, semantics...
What I had in mind was no partitioning needed - assuming there is already one partition present at current.

Post in question edited for clarification.

To activate a swapfile at boot:

tinycore swapfile{=hda1}            Scan or Specify swapfile

though I highly doubt with specific hardware constellation swap at boot would ever play any role.

[floppy]

Thanks,
so I will try at the next opportunity (after sticking in an extensive battle with santa which is robbing my whole energy)
- hda2 SWAP 300k; just in case
- hda1 rest as linux partition
But the installation HOWTO indicated boot/swap/linux-rest. So, this installation HOWTO should be updated?
Regards,
Pascal

[gerald_clark]

The howto covers a more general case than your tiny 6G drive.
The howto covers general concepts.
A user is expected to adapt it where necessary to specific conditions.

[floppy]

Thanks,
then, I will stay with the general advices, adapted with forum answers
- hda1 100MB boot
- hda2 tce, home,..
- hda3 300MB swap (for just in case)
Pascal