file system on 9.0

[Thomas Mueller]

from darcsis at gmail.com (Denise H. G.):

> I strongly advise that /usr and /usr/local reside on different
> partitions. Furthermore, If you plan to run a desktop environment, your
> /usr/local should be big enough, say 8G - 10G, to hold all stuff you
> built from the ports. And putting /var on a separate partitiion is a
> good idea, I think.
 
> You can find detailed information on how to lay out and size your
> partitions in tuning(7) either locally or online.

The one directory I really want to put on a separate partition is /home .
That way, you can fully rebuild/redo your system and keep user data.

I don't like to put /var on a separate partition because of the danger of running short of space.
I had nervous moments when running freebsd-update on the older computer and seeing the used part of /var grow.

I don't really see a need to put /usr/local on a separate partition, though conceivably you could build applications with both FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc, but keep these separate.  NetBSD pkgsrc has been ported to other (quasi-)Unixes including FreeBSD.  Default directory corresponding to FreeBSD's /usr/local is /usr/pkg .

I think I like FreeBSD ports better than NetBSD pkgsrc, the latter which I used only with NetBSD.

I originally installed FreeBSD 9.0-BETA1 using bsdinstall on the USB stick, including the ports.

There was a conflict when I ran "portsnap fetch update", that didn't work.  I had to run "portsnap fetch" and "portsnap extract", scrapping the ports tree from bsdinstall in favor of the fresh ports tree.  So now I know best to not install ports tree from bsdinstall; this would presumably apply for sysinstall too.

Tom