Plunk that CD in the drive

Okay. Now is the moment of truth. We've got the CD in the drive, and we're ready to go. Restart the computer. This should now boot the Linux kernel located on your CD ROM.

What you'll have to do first is partition the hard drive. There is an easy way to do this. You can dedicate the whole hard disk or non-Windows partition (depending on the type of install you're doing). There is a better alternative. That is to partition your hard disk even further and put "parts" of Linux on separate partitions. For example, this is the scheme that works for me:

Let's take a 10 gigabyte hard drive as an example. First, you should see how much RAM you have. From this figure, you create what's known as a SWAP partition. This is simply a way that Linux uses to get an extra memory boost. Custom dictates that your swap partition be double your ram memory. So if you've got 256 megabytes of RAM, the feel free to make a 500 megabyte swap partition. Then my partition scheme ends up looking like this:

Partition	Location	Size
swap	/dev/hda2	500 mb
/ (boot)	/dev/hda1	1.2 gb
/usr	/dev/hda3	3.5 gb
/home	/dev/hda4	5 gb

Assign partitions to look like this. Don't worry about the /usr and /home parts. That will come after. You must indicate here that you want / to be the bootable partition. /usr will contain most of the programs that will run on your machine. /home will contain your personal files. This kind of a partition scheme may come in handy if you have problems with your hard disk. You may be able to save information if it's located in different partitions easier than if it were only one big partition.

Before we actually assign the other partitions their places and functions, we need to initialize and activate a the swap partition. Do this now.

Now you should initialize the / partition - the one that will boot the Linux kernel.

Now, there is what I consider a little glitch in the Debian install. It doesn't really take into account that you want to initialize /usr and /home partitions. Don't go to the next step yet. You should go back and initialize these partitions now before proceeding.

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