It's perfectly fine to partition from SunOS; in fact, if you intend to run both SunOS and Debian on the same machine, it is recommended that you partition using SunOS prior to installing Debian. The Linux kernel understands Sun disk labels, so there are no problems there. Just make sure you leave room for the Debian root partition within the first 1GB area of the boot disk. You can also place the kernel image on a UFS partition if that is easier than putting the root partition there. SILO supports booting Linux and SunOS from either EXT2 (Linux), UFS (SunOS), romfs and iso9660 (CDROM) partitions. Whatever system you are using to partition, make sure you create a Sun disk label on your boot disk. This is the only kind of partition scheme that the OpenBoot PROM understands, and so it's the only scheme from which you can boot. In fdisk, the s key is used to create Sun disk labels. You only need to do this on drives that do not already have a Sun disk label. If you are using a drive that was previously formatted using a PC (or other architecture) you must create a new disk label, or problems with the disk geometry will most likely occur. You will probably be using SILO as your boot loader (the small program which runs the operating system kernel). SILO has certain requirements for partition sizes and location; see .