[clue-tech] how much room?

[Roy J. Tellason]

I saw some discussion go by in here recently about a laptop coming with XP and 
dealing with that...

I'm in a similar situation here.  I had one laptop,  an older unit with some 
pretty limited resources (mostly too small a HD),  and not too long ago 
acquired this one I'm currently typing on,  which came with XP installed.

I've really no interest in actually *using* any m$ products personally,  
having had to put up with enough crap on many versions of it over the years 
that once I got linux up and running way back in 1999 I've pretty much used 
only linux ever since.  I've even installed it on other machines in the 
household here and gotten other folks to use it,  too,  over some 
objections.  :-)

However I've had the occasional idle thought that it might be good for me to 
have XP on some box somewhere,  just to be able to refer to it or maybe run 
an app that wouldn't run any other way or whatever the case may be.  So I 
decided to leave it on this box,  though with way less space than the whole 
drive it was using to begin with.

I started out getting a free burner program that somebody recommended,  and 
downloaded and burned myselfa set of Slackware 12.1 discs and also gparted, 
which worked quite nicely.  I shrunk the XP partition down to 3G,  did my 
install,  and so far so good.  Of course XP complained the first time I fired 
it up but after a bit of cleanup that complaint went away.

My question is,  how much smaller can I make that partition?  What all can I 
rip out of there that I won't need,  to give me some more space?  I somehow 
ended up with no swap partition,  and I'd like to correct that before I 
invest too much time in this setup,  for one thing,  and want the ext3 
partition to get most of what's available here.

No,  I don't want to just lose XP entirely here,  and I sure as heck don't 
want to dedicate another machine to it.  You guys have any other suggestions?





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