%general-entities; ]> Like most other operating systems, LFS is usually installed on a dedicated partition. If you have an empty partition or enough unpartitioned space on one of your hard disks to make one, using this for your LFS installation is recommended. However, an LFS system (in fact even multiple LFS systems) may also be installed on a partition already occupied by another operating system and the different systems will co-exist peacefully. The document explains how to implement this, whereas this book discusses the method of using a fresh partition for the installation. A minimal system requires a partition of around 1.3 gigabytes (GB). This is enough to store all the source tarballs and compile the packages. However, if the LFS system is intended to be the primary Linux system, additional software will probably be installed which will require additional space (2 or 3 GB). The LFS system itself will not take up this much space. A large portion of this required amount of space is to provide sufficient free temporary space. Compiling packages can require a lot of disk space which will be reclaimed after the package is installed. Because there is not always enough Random Access Memory (RAM) available for compilation processes, it is a good idea to use a small disk partition as swap space. This space is used by the kernel to store seldom-used data to make room in memory for active processes. The swap partition for an LFS system can be the same as the one used by the host system, so another swap partition will not need to be created if your host system already has one setup. Start a disk partitioning program such as cfdisk or fdisk with a command line option naming the hard disk on which the new partition will be created—for example /dev/hda for the primary Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) disk. Create a Linux native partition and a swap partition, if needed. Please refer to the man pages of cfdisk or fdisk if you do not yet know how to use the programs. Remember the designation of the new partition (e.g., hda5). This book will refer to this as the LFS partition. Also remember the designation of the swap partition. These names will be needed later for the /etc/fstab file. On a Cobalt RaQ2/Cube2 we use the existing firmware for a boot loader, it requires an ext2 revision 0 partition to boot from. So here is the recommended partition for a Cobalt RaQ2/Cube2 system: The first partition should be 50-100 MB. The second partition should be all the remaining space minus the amount of RAM in the system. The third partition is going to be your swap partition, which will be the same amount as the RAM installed in the system. Alphas have one of 2 BIOSes, Alphaboot or SRM. Some models have both and you can switch between them at powerup. Each bios has a different boot method. Milo is cool because it can be blown into flash for a FAST boot, but its built against an older linux kernel and crashes with some hardware, like a SCSI controller. aboot is simple if you can use it, but needs BSD partitions. aboot doesn't really let you do much at boot time that crosses devices. If you load aboot from hda, your root needs to be on hda. install aboot on hdb if you want to move your root to hdb. Once linux is loaded, you can do whatever you want. Milo can handle loading the kernel from one disk and the root on another. If you boot with SRM and aboot, you *MUST* use BSD style partitions. You *MUST* also leave the first 2 cylinders unused as they will contain your boot loader. I've read that partition 3 should always be the full disk even though it overlaps with other partitions, but in my experience that doesn't matter. If you choose to not use an EXT2 or EXT3 root filesystem, you'll need to go through some extra hoops to install aboot. If you boot with Milo, use msdos partitions, and make the first partition large enough for at least 2 kernels (I would use about 500Megs) and make it a FAT filesystem.