Partition plan

I’d like a small partition in the lead, doesn’t need to be big, I’ll probably use OpenBSD or an old FreeBSD 6.0 disk for setup. I just want a pretty minimal install, kernel, manual pages, and required binaries. I’d like it to be a pretty small slice but with enough room to hold a few files in a ‘pinch. Its basically just there in case I need to do some recovery operations and can’t boot the primary OS.

As far as that goes, PC-BSD v1.4 when it is released.

# PC-BSD v1.4
ad0s2 66560MB (65GB)
/ 10240MB (10GB)
/swap 1024MB (1GB)
/home/ 20480MB (20GB)
/usr/ 25600MB (25GB)
/var/ 512MB (0.5GB)

All sizes are approximate but I’m figuring I should have 7-8gb free space in the slice. 512mb will be more then enough for /var, my current system has /tmp linked to /var/tmp and is only using 120-150mb on a 2.5gb partition. 10GB should be plenty for the root partition. My laptops not even 10GB with /:/usr:/home all being on the same partition. So I expect roughly 20gb for my home directory and ~25gb to be plenty for /usr. I could probably thin back /var and add a nice fat /tmp/ but I figure the spare space on / will do if I need the extra room in /tmp when un-packing a file. /usr/ports and /usr/src is only about 800-1200MB so it won’t make much dent into my /usr partition.

# My Laptop, PC-BSDv1.3.4 is on ad0s3, the other partitions are for storeage
Terry@Dixie$ df -h 8:41
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s3a 36G 8.2G 25G 25% /
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
/dev/ad0s3e 2.9G 135M 2.5G 5% /var
/dev/ad0s1 10G 1.1G 8.9G 11% /mnt/ad0s1
/dev/ad0s2 20G 48K 20G 0% /mnt/ad0s2
linprocfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /usr/compat/linux/proc
Terry@Dixie$ 8:41

I can finally clean up my laptops partitions… which I have wanted to do for a long while but havn’t had time or wish to do to a ‘stable’ system. If its not broke don’t fix it ! But since I’ll need to reformat, may as well. I like to have issues of partitioning set out BEFORE I do any install. That way I know roughly what I want before hand. So I can adopt it to what I need when the situation comes up. As I have it now, I’ve got a few Gigs worth of free slice planned, more then enough for a minimalist BSD install. Plus a few free gigs on the main PC-BSD slice. So I can add another partition if I need to, it does leave me room to use growfs on my future PC-BSD install if I need to later on.

I hope the Release will be soon, that way I won’t have to lose much time. My home directory is cut down to only what it needs to function with copies of the backups near by in case I need some thing. Once my little synchronizer is done I can complete my change of browsers and get Vectra (an OpenBSD box) setup running an FTP server on the LAN to felicitate it. Thus I should again be able to keep my bookmark/mail/settings the same between computers again. Since I remembered Lynx has good support for Vi and Emacs keybindings… I’m almost tempted to switch to using Lynx as my primary browser but I know sasclan.org is pretty crappy in Lynx !!! And Links doesn’t work natively on Win32 yet afaik.

5 minutes to local 0500…. time to go to sleep !!!!