--- 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 _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now. http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush