[plug] New subscriber

[Leon Brooks]

Anvil Iron wrote:

>> Are you making /boot as a separate partition?

>> It's usually safest to make a /boot partition of about 10MB so that the
>> last cylinder is less 1024 because this causes havoc with some old
>> machines.

> Im out of my depth here I was trying to partition my hard drive before
> installing linux.  The error message prevented me from even modifying the
> boot partition

It is considered lucky to start your partitions with a small (10-15MB) 
partition mounted on /boot, especially where you *may* be having 
partitioning problems. This guarantees that all of the files you need to 
get the kernel started with fall below the 1024-cylinder limit present 
in some BIOS/HDD combinations. Once the Linux kernel has started, any 
BIOS problems evapourate. The minimalist partitioning I recommend for 
you (you can get fancier with your next install) is:

/boot   ext2       15M
(swap)             64M
/       reiserfs   (remainder)

> I would like to have a stable OS to run a word processor browse the net and
> run autocad 2000 and possibly some other drawing packages.

ACAD 2000 will almost certainly cause you a heartache. Autodesk are far 
too fond of tinkering down in the OS where they have no business, which 
causes it to be a bear even on OSes it's officially supported for. If it 
doesn't fly under WINE (wait a month or two before trying it, the 
DirectX code is being enhanced as we speak), try it under Win4Lin (from 
Traverse Technologies, you can get a free trial).

Autodesk have said that they are not interested in a Linux port. More 
fool them. There are several other CAD packages around which will 
read/write DXF (AutoCAD) files, including some native to Linux.

-- 
"If I employed software developers, and they gave me something
like this, I'd shoot them." -- Abby Franquemont, on Windows