But I just thought I'd get the opinions of the list on the best way to set up such a brand-new machine -- do you partition your hard-drives?
I usually do.
But on a Mac, I have decided not to to be play too smart. I'll usually format a gig or two for classic and leave the rest to the boot drive.
I have not satisfied myself that there is any advantage to a swap partition, and I won't mention why here. On the other hand, Apple may have decided to let fstab have some so in Panther, in which case a separate swap partition can help smooth the virtual memory system a bit.
Some of your Mac OS X applications may throw a hissy if they are not on the boot partition, or if the users are not on the boot partition, so you lose most of anything you'd gain with separate /home or /usr. And the automount puts everything under /Volumes, anyway.
However, if you plan to serve the web with that box, a separate partition for web stuff might give you warm fuzzies and maybe even some real protection. Just make sure you format any partition(s) for web as Unix File System, instead of HFS+. That way you should actually get the permissions bits to work right.
I might also have another UFS partition for PostGreSQL and other such.
I also keep a spare hugh partition if I can, for downloads and large images. If you have a bigfiles partition it should be HFS+, of course.
Do you have the system on one partition and documents on another and so on?
No, that just buys you heartache in Mac OS X, of present.
Any issues around the installation of Perl and other things like C libraries that I should be thinking about?
I like to have multiple users, one for doing serious work in, one, perhaps with limits on it, for surfing, and, of course. I also like to make two administrator accounts, just in case something goes haywire in one.
Most people don't really need to bother with anything fancy, just let the install set up run.
--
Joel Rees
If God had meant for us to not tweak our source code,
He'd've given us Microsoft.