--- John Horner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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? Do you have the system
on one
> partition and documents on another and so on? Any
issues
> around the installation of Perl and other things
like C libraries
> that I should be thinking about?
Generally speaking I haven't had need to install any
libraries (or other *nix goodies) other than those
from the developer tools. I needed libraries for
OpenOffice and TeXShop, and occasionally for specific
Perl modules (expat, libxml2). Other *nix stuff I've
done include lynx/links/elinks (for webdesign testing)
and CVS. I'd say, do the stuff for OOo and TeXShop if
you're into that, otherwise just install them as you
need them.
I'm all for partitioning. I haven't had the issues
that a bunch of others apparently have (I am still on
Jaguar though). My current partitions are something
like System (4GB), Volatile (8GB), and Static (25GB).
System holds most boot and / stuff along with
developer tools; Volatile holds most of my documents,
/Users, and /Applications* (and perl's site_lib
incidentally); and Static holds my media that change
rather infrequently (MP3s, movies, developer tools
documentation, some images).
The upsides to this arrangement are: if I toast my
system I can just wipe the partition and reinstall the
OS without needing to reinstall all my applications
(*nix programs will need reinstall, but they're
smaller, by and large; and OOo will need reinstalling)
and without damaging preferences, user files, etc. On
a production rather than development box this would be
less important. Also if I want to search for something
I can pretty reliably limit where I'm looking to about
8GB out of 40. And it helps keep things looking clean
since I have a bunch of files that are shared and
/Users/shared has other purposes according to various
installers. (Though I suppose you could just dump them
all in a folder on your single partition.)
The downsides are that you need to watch your free
space when considering partition size: make sure you
have enough swap space on System (so on Panther that'd
be 3~10GB after all the OS, C libraries, *nix
programs, Xtools), and make sure you have enough free
space on Volatile for any large downloads and for the
iTunes preferences/library (iTunes gets quite
persnickety if you run out of space, and can start
harming the system too). And you need to bear in mind
the limitations of moving /Applications off the boot
partition.
* Moving /Applications is considered by most to be a
_bad_ idea. Since I have about 5GB of Aqua/OSX
applications the ability to avoid reinstalling them is
worth it to me. There are a few different methods of
doing so, I chose the one resembling moving /Users--
namely just put it where you want and make a symlink
(for /Users you'd also have to go in and mess with
NetInfo)-- because it seemed to have the fewest/least
severe issues involved with it.
The biggest problem I've noticed with this method is
that Software Update doesn't always respect the
symlink and will occasionally overwrite it with a
folder of the same name and drop whatever in there
(not always a whole .app bundle either; e.g. Safari
1.0.1 to 1.0.2), or sometimes just won't work at all
(e.g. the iTunes 4.4 to 4.5 update appears to have
gone to /dev/null every time until I made the
/Applications folder and moved iTunes into it). This
has been annoying but since I knew about it getting
into things it hasn't surprised or bothered me too
much; again, it doesn't happen reliably, just often
enough to bear in mind. The only other downside I've
noticed is that Disk First Aid can't properly scan the
disk it's running on.
If you were to follow this method, I'd suggest
installing that first huge batch of Software Update
stuff before moving /Applications over, just to avoid
any possible problems since there're so many updates
on a brand new system.
FWIW, YMMV, etc,
~wren
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