Partioning Troubles.

I am having a little trouble with partitioning on my netbook.

Right now I have gparted open next to the mint installation and I am trying to create a swap space, but I keep getting this error, "It is not possible to create more than 4 primary partitions."

I have right at this moment these partitions:
-sda1 = 72 Gb, NTFS, Windows xp is located here
-sda2 = 70.05 Gb, ext4, I am trying to install Linux Mint 8 here

-unallocated = 2 Gb, I want to use this as a swap space for linux mint 8 but when I click "New" on it I get the error message above. And when I try to format it into swap space in the installation process it just says "unusable" and I can't do anything with it.

-sda3 = 4.89 Gb, Fat32 I think this has something to do with XP recovery or something
-sda4 = 47.07, unknown, I think this is also for windows recovery or something.

Is there anyway around this error message? I think I want to do this, tell me if this is a good choice:
-Grow the sda2 and take all the allocated space.
-Make the Sda2 an extended partition (I have no clue how to do this)
-Make the swap space partition 2 gb inside the extended partition (still clueless)

Will I have to do that? And if so how?

 

Nevermind I finished Succesfully.

 

Cool! Stop back and tell us what you think of Mint.

 

I like linux a lot. It's much less sluggish than windows. I have customized to how I like it and enjoy it very much. One thing that I am still having trouble with though is the battery life. In windows xp, I can get maybe 8 solid hours. In Linux I can barely get six. Is there any way I can increase battery life in linux? I tried to decrease the brightness and use no animations but that only shaves off about 10 minutes.

 

Yup, that is a pretty common complaint. Right now power management in Ubuntu/Mint is pretty poor.

I have been keeping an eye on the WattOS project. It's an attempt to build an Ubuntu-based distro with more (lighter) desktop environments and better power management. Unfortunately their website is down at present but here is the distrowatch link:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wattos

I think it is primarily one guy who is doing most of the development so it might be another year or so before this project amounts to anything.

Another option is to use the controls featured in eeebuntu which allow you to throttle the processor and do a few other things. Eeebuntu 3.0 is kind of obsolete right now and has become a pain in the rear due to its dependence on ubuntu's repos but 4.0 is right around the corner. The beta is almost out. 4.0 will be Debian-based meaning it will be lighter and faster and it will be a rolling release so you just have to install it once rather than updating every six months like with Mint and Ubuntu. Despite the recent problems with eeebuntu, which really aren't their fault, the development team for eeebuntu does a really nice job and has won some awards. Check them out:

http://www.eeebuntu.org/

 

download and checkout Powertop also....might be of some help as it recommends settings for longer battery life based on your system.