Hello! My apologies for the length of this post. Summary: 4.x or 5.x for a desktop machine, disk partitioning for a workstation, miscellaneous installation questions.
Okay, the details! Now that I have my local FreeBSD server (mail/news, router, firewall) successfully running, I'm ready to tackle my workstation. This is currently a system with a P4-2.6Ghz, 512MB RAM, an 80GB EIDE disk, and "the usual" devices (CDR, CD/DVD player, network adapter and so on). At this time it is running Windows XP, and I plan to keep it where it is. To avoid having two operating systems on the same disk, I've purchased an identical HD (WD800BB) where FreeBSD will live on. Since I don't download movies or obscene amounts of MP3s, this is all a bit spacey. The XP disk only uses 35 of 80GB and I doubt the FreeBSD one will even be this "full". How times change. :) 4.8 or 5.1? My "personal server" happily runs 4.8R and will be updated to 4.9 when -stable becomes a bit more stable. It consists of older hardware and I don't plan to upgrade it to 5.x any time soon, if ever. But what do you recommend for the workstation? It doesn't have dual-processors and all of its hardware seems to be supported by 4.x. This machine, though, will eventually get 5.x. I'm wondering if it makes sense to put 4.8 on it now or if it would be a better choice to just go with 5.1R. My primary concern here is ease of upgrading. Will it be difficult to go from 4.9 to 5.2, somewhere down the road? Mergemaster is a rather scary looking critter. Differently put, will there be tools provided to allow this without too much fiddling? Partitions If anything brings out the perfectionist in me, it is figuring out how to partition a disk. What I have in mind for the 80GB FreeBSD disk for the workstation is this: / = 512MB (too spacey, but that should be plenty for future releases) swap = 3GB (see notes below) /var = 1GB (probably too much, but the room's there) /tmp = 1GB (256MB would probably be enough, but why not?) /usr = the rest (essentially 74GB) The machine currently has 512MB of RAM, but since I won't have the financial means or desire to get a new complete system in the next two to four years, it's possible that I'll upgrade the memory first to 1GB and later to 1.5GB if needed or wanted. 3GB would then be an acceptable amount of swap space, but I certainly won't need this much right now, and I might never. Am I overdoing it, or doesn't it really matter since I don't seem to lack storage room anyway? Then there's this huge /usr partition. 74GB. I thought about splitting this between /home and /usr, but I have honestly no idea (and experience) how much space I'll end up using where. It probably wouldn't matter since I won't need more 30 or 40GB of that space. There's also the possibility that I might end up using the second disk (another 80GB one that currently belongs to XP) for FreeBSD also. That would then be for /home, if for some unexpected reason I should need more space. In other words, I would like to keep this option open. This workstation won't hold "critical" data, so I do not plan on backing up entire partitions. If all of this is inefficient and I'm missing the obvious, please let me know. Keep in mind that I -am- new to the FreeBSD and Unix world. I'm open for suggestions here. Miscellaneous - FreeBSD will be on the second disk. Is Sysinstall, if FreeBSD is installed on the slave, going to ask if I'd like to put the BootMgr on the first drive? - In case I decide to make the second disk (with FreeBSD) the master drive some time in the not-so-near future, will it be fairly simple to accomplish this? Only jumper rearrangement, MBR and fstab editing? - Anything else I need to pay particular attention to? Besides backing up important files on the XP disk in case something goes wrong. Thanks! Cheers, Michael _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
