partitioning

[xorox]

hello,
I am a complete newbie when it comes to anything remotely related to *nix. However this is something that I hope to fix, as I am currently a C programmer with about 2 years of experience of programming Win32 applications, I think that being as I now I have a good background in Windows administration that learning *nix administration would be a good idea. As a C programmer I know of its strong dominance in the *nix world, and I think it'd be interesting to be able to have source infront of me, leaving me the ability to modify it however I want.

Anyways, onto my problem. I have no experience installing *nix variants. I have no idea what partitions are necessary, or what would be reasonable sizes for each given my current configuration. I plan on installing FreeBSD 6.2 RELEASE. Yes, I am starting with FreeBSD, as I learned with C it's best not to waste time, I could start with a Linux distro but I doubt it'd be a whole lot easier, and my final goal is BSD system administration, so I think overall it's the best bet. On top of that, after reading over briefings on the GPL and BSD licenses, I prefer the BSD license (it is how I as a programmer feel about recycling existing code).

First I'll give you a few important details:

My HDD = 20GB
My RAM = 320MB

Here is what the FDISK Partition Tool in the FreeBSD installer looks like (stripped down to only relevant text):

http://rafb.net/p/eZztjb25.html

As you can see there, the NTFS partition is obviously Windows, my goal here is to create a dual boot, as I've read FreeBSD has it's own boot manager. What I'd like to do here is use the the entire amount of unpartitioned space for a full FreeBSD installation (as you see there, there is 4469MB of unpartitioned space, which should be plenty for a beginner like me).

The problem is, is like I said, creating the partitions for FreeBSD. I don't know which I need, I've read several tutorials where people are using different ones, and some are using others that some aren't. Secondly, I don't know reasonable sizes to allocate each necessary partition (giving the amount of disk space and RAM I currently have available), other than the swap, which I've read should be 2.5 times the size of the installed RAM.

Could anyone please help me out here? I know there's gotta be users here who have probably successfully done this countless times, on countless different systems. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.



Thank you in advance.

[Schotty]

hello,
I am a complete newbie when it comes to anything remotely related to *nix. However this is something that I hope to fix, as I am currently a C programmer with about 2 years of experience of programming Win32 applications, I think that being as I now I have a good background in Windows administration that learning *nix administration would be a good idea. As a C programmer I know of its strong dominance in the *nix world, and I think it'd be interesting to be able to have source infront of me, leaving me the ability to modify it however I want.

Anyways, onto my problem. I have no experience installing *nix variants. I have no idea what partitions are necessary, or what would be reasonable sizes for each given my current configuration. I plan on installing FreeBSD 6.2 RELEASE. Yes, I am starting with FreeBSD, as I learned with C it's best not to waste time, I could start with a Linux distro but I doubt it'd be a whole lot easier, and my final goal is BSD system administration, so I think overall it's the best bet. On top of that, after reading over briefings on the GPL and BSD licenses, I prefer the BSD license (it is how I as a programmer feel about recycling existing code).

First I'll give you a few important details:

My HDD = 20GB
My RAM = 320MB

Here is what the FDISK Partition Tool in the FreeBSD installer looks like (stripped down to only relevant text):

http://rafb.net/p/eZztjb25.html

As you can see there, the NTFS partition is obviously Windows, my goal here is to create a dual boot, as I've read FreeBSD has it's own boot manager. What I'd like to do here is use the the entire amount of unpartitioned space for a full FreeBSD installation (as you see there, there is 4469MB of unpartitioned space, which should be plenty for a beginner like me).

The problem is, is like I said, creating the partitions for FreeBSD. I don't know which I need, I've read several tutorials where people are using different ones, and some are using others that some aren't. Secondly, I don't know reasonable sizes to allocate each necessary partition (giving the amount of disk space and RAM I currently have available), other than the swap, which I've read should be 2.5 times the size of the installed RAM.

Could anyone please help me out here? I know there's gotta be users here who have probably successfully done this countless times, on countless different systems. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.



Thank you in advance.

For creating partitions in UNIX like OSs, you really only need one partition, two is preferred, more if you know what you are doing.

The one that is always needed is your root partition. The preferred one to not leave out is the swap. That makes swap paging much much much much more snappy. EXT/Reiser does not handle files well (kinda like how windows would operate for example). Linux is that way at least. BSD may need it, I have never tried UFS without swap.

When creating the partitioning setup do the following:

Partition 1 - NTFS
Partition 2 - BSD slice

That whole thing will now encompass all you want on BSD. Within that slice, you can create partitions like the root and swap.

As for sizes, 10 each should be fine. Make the swap an even 512mb for simplicity or if you feel like probably overdoing it a wee bit, go for 768MB.

[Kernel_Killer]

Like Schotty was saying, really you should do the two partition method. UFS2 is still going to use a swap, so be sure to add that partition in your slice. With only 4G to play with, I wouldn't even try to make a FBSD workstation for play, and split the slice into multiple partitions. Depending on the amount of RAM you actually have will decide how much to allocate for the swap.

Since you only have 4G, I would do about 256M, 512M at the most. With that little space, you aren't going to be able to install anything to take up that swap space. If you had more space, and had 256M of RAM, you would want to allocate about 512M for the swap. 512M of RAM, maybe 768M. 1024M, about 512M. Swap is about the same as your virtual memory in Windows (in retrospect).