swap partition sizes. One rule of thumb that works well is to use as much
swap as you have system memory, although there probably isn't much point
in going over 64MB of swap for most users. It also shouldn't be smaller
than 16MB, in most cases. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules.
If you are trying to solve 10,000 simultaneous equations on a machine with
256MB of memory, you may need a gigabyte (or more) of swap space.

As an example, consider a machine that has 32MB of RAM and a 1.7GB IDE
drive on /dev/hda. There is a 500MB partition for another operating system
on /dev/hda1. A 32MB swap partition is used on /dev/hda3 and the rest,
about 1.2GB, on /dev/hda2 is the Linux partition.

Partitioning Prior to Installation

There are two different times that you can partition: prior to or during
the installation of Debian. If your computer will be solely dedicated to
Debian you should partition during installation as described in section
3.5 on page [*]. If you have a machine with more than one operating system
on it, you should generally let the other operating system create its own
partitions.

The following sections contain information regarding partitioning in your
native operating system prior to Debian installation. Note that you'll
have to map between how the other operating system names partitions and
how Linux names partitions; see Table 2.1 on page [*].

Partitioning from DOS or Windows

If you are manipulating existing FAT or NTFS partitions, it is recommended
that you use either the scheme below or native Windows or DOS tools.