New user - small file server questions and quick GUI question

[Kaya Saman]

Many thanks again for all suggestions! :-)

[...]
>
> For my desktop, with around 450 ports installed, I have the following lay-out;
>
> Filesystem         Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/ad4s1a        484M     93M    353M    21%    /
> /dev/ad4s1g.eli    373G    168G    175G    49%    /home
> /dev/ad4s1e         48G    198K     45G     0%    /tmp
> /dev/ad4s1f         19G    5.8G     12G    32%    /usr
> /dev/ad4s1d        1.9G    226M    1.6G    12%    /var
>
>   
[...]

Hmm.......

lot's of different pieces of advice rolling in now!


I guess what I will do as I have a small hard disk for what I want to do 
which is to get rid of my music and few movies which are stored on my 
laptop currently, is create separate /, /tmp, /usr and /var.

I propose which is similar to what Frank has suggested:

/   ~500M
/tmp ~2GB
/var ~2GB
/usr ~2GB
/home the rest

but then Jerry has already suggested:

 partition   mount point     Size 
   a            /             512 MegaBytes  (1/2 GByte)
   b            swap         2048 MBytes     (2 GBytes)
   d            /tmp          512 MBytes
   e            /usr         4096 MBytes
   f            /var         4096 MBytes
   g            /home          29 GB  (eg all of the rest of the disk)


This could be ok I reckon as the 4GB partitions should be there as 
everyone has suggested for me to use ports and build from source!

The reason why I preferred to use package manager was that on say 
Solaris it's pretty a much a pain having to install all the dependencies 
from Sun Freeware site.

I mean what I will be installing if completely base install with just OS 
and nothing more like I mentioned before is Samba, NFS server/client, 
NTP, Nano as the quote below from Jerry using vi or vim is not my 
preferred text editor as I find them extremely difficult and a real pain 
to use.

In addition I do not think this machine has a DVD drive either although 
I haven't fired up the Win build yet to transfer files but from what the 
drive says on the front of 52x looks like it's CD only :-(

This means that I will need to download the minimal install CD and 
install the packages from there!

For this reason the discussed packages above will need to be downloaded 
and installed my best guess is from source. Meaning I will need extra 
space in one of the filesystems but am unsure where the source gets 
stored?? My best guess would be /usr?

Have setup the machine now and am almost at the point of attempted an 
install! :-)

Guys the support has been really awsome and I highly appreciate 
everyones efforts to assist me!

[quote]

So, use 'vi' or install 'vim' from ports and us it.
Since 'vi' is always available, it becomes important to learn it
and then it is second nature to use it.   (actually, vi is not
available in single user mode if you do not have /usr mounted, but
I usually just put a copy in /bin and then it is always available)


[/quote]