[Wine] Re: Planning first Linux/Wine install

[Mantar, Feyelno nek dusa]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:06:52 -0700, anandpursahibwale wrote:

> I'm planning my first Linux/Wine install.  Is there any advantage to
> having a Windows (say W2K) partition to install Win apps to, when the plan
> is to run them under Wine/Linux?

 Yeah. Once in a while you may hit a weird installer that doesn't work
at all under Wine. If that happens and you really need that app, a second
partition with Windows can be pretty handy. And if the app itself doesn't
work under Wine you can use actual Windows.
 If you're planning on any gaming or heavy-duty hardware usage under
Windows, then a separate partition and dual-boot setup is best. If you're
just going to use it to install things for Wine and maybe run a couple of
other apps that Wine dislikes, then you might be better off skipping the
partition method and just installing a Windows image under Qemu. With the
accelerator kernel-module, qemu runs almost native speed, and you avoid
all that nasty mucking about with rebooting.

> Any other suggestions (I'm planning out my partition sizes on a blank 73GB
> SCSI HD now).

 Umm. Let's see. Absolutely make a separate home folder partition -- it's
handy if you want to wipe your system and switch distros, so you don't
lose your settings and data. A couple gigs for /usr/local might be
nice, too, since things you compile yourself will end up there, saving
you from recompiling it in the wipe scenario. It's not a bad idea to
leave some unpartitioned space at the end for later, too. You can mount a
partition anywhere inside the file system, so if your /home/foo/music
folder gets full, you can make a partition and move the files in there,
then mount it permanently at /home/foo/music by adding it to /etc/fstab.

 Put your swap space on a fast part of the drive. You can test by it by
booting a livecd, partitioning it into segments of 5 gigs or whatever,
then using "hdparm -t /dev/hda##" to test speeds on each "##" partition of
the drive "hda". I spend a few minutes doing that with any new drive --
it's not a big boost, but it helps. (hda would be primary master, and the
numbers are 1-4 for any primary partitions, 5 and up for the logical
partitions)
 The fastest part is generally at one end of the drive, though
which end it is depends on how the manufacturer set up the drive's
controller to map the real physical disk to the generic LBA interface.
Most seem to map the edge of the disk (fastest spinning part) to the start
of the drive, but I had one that did the opposite.

 
>  I'm giving up on OS/2 after 13 years, and don't really want to rely on W2K,

 Ah, OS/2, we hardly knew ye. I'm an Amiga refugee, myself. :) Welcome
aboard!