New user - small file server questions and quick GUI question

Tue Dec 29 22:46:48 UTC 2009

Roland:
>
> If you can afford it, and if your laptop has a USB port, buy one of those
> external harddisks. Plenty of room for music and movies... Also great for
> backups!
>   

Can't afford :-( I have many disks like that where I bought really cool 
enclosures and the drives separately but currently am in a really bad 
situation financially. In UK in my parents house I have round 3.2TB or 
so with 1.7TB dedicated to music and movies. Out here though I only have 
my 320GB drive on my laptop which has 9 OS's on it including VM's. 160GB 
for Linux which I have Fedora 10 and Kubuntu on the other side I run 
OpenSolaris and Belenix in different ZFS pools.

Laptop is cool 6GB memory too :-)

~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x34f7742e

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1       19453   156256191   bf  Solaris
/dev/sda2           19454       23709    34186320   83  Linux
/dev/sda3   *       23710       25534    14659312+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4           25535       38913   107466817+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           25535       38665   105474726   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           38666       38913     1992028+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

~# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              33G   11G   21G  34% /
tmpfs                 2.9G  4.0K  2.9G   1% /lib/init/rw
varrun                2.9G  240K  2.9G   1% /var/run
varlock               2.9G  4.0K  2.9G   1% /var/lock
udev                  2.9G  180K  2.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs                 2.9G  708K  2.9G   1% /dev/shm
lrm                   2.9G  2.5M  2.9G   1% 
/lib/modules/2.6.28-17-generic/volatile
/dev/sda5             100G   93G  1.2G  99% /home
/dev/sda3              14G  9.6G  3.6G  74% /mnt/tmp
>  
>   
>> I propose which is similar to what Frank has suggested:
>>
>> /   ~500M
>> /tmp ~2GB
>> /var ~2GB
>> /usr ~2GB
>> /home the rest
>>     
>
> I would make /usr greater. See below.
>
>   
>> 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!
>>     
>
> I'd make /usr bigger. 5-10 GiB, if you can spare it.
>   

Err I will try 4GB because I need to dump round 10-15GB here clogging up 
my disks. In fact I just partitioned the drive using FreeBSIE and I 
think it's only a 30GB on this desktop which I can always look into 
getting a new one in time. But slightly stuck for now!

>   
>
> Realize that not all software is available as packages because of
> e.g. licensing restrictions. And some ports you can customize via so-called
> "options". If you install from packages, you're stuck with the (default)
> options used when building the packages.
>
> The FreeBSD ports system is _so_ convenient. It's one of the great features of
> FreeBSD, as is the user community.
>   

I just the packages I mentioned before that's it! If I can do that it 
will be really cool.....

>   
>
> The ee(1) editor is part of the base system. This is a _lot_ friendlier than vi!
> Give it a try, you might not even need nano.
>   

I will try it out thanks for that! :-)

>   
>> 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 :-(
>>     
>
> Good enough for installing. :-)
>  
>   
>> For this reason the discussed packages above will need to be downloaded 
>> and installed my best guess is from source.
>>     
>
> Installing from source is the most flexible method. How is your internet
> connection?
>   

Hahahah the biggest joke of 2k9 is my internet as it's 512kbps :-( 
That's what happens when you move country to a developing one things 
slow down to a halt. In UK I had 20Mbps aaaah I really miss it!

>   
>> 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?
>>     
>
> In /usr/ports to be exact. The source code tarballs are also stored there,
> under /usr/ports/distfiles. On my system, /usr/ports/distfiles is now 799
> MiB (450 ports, remember!). The rest of /usr/ports is 543 MiB. Realize that
> ports will be compiled under /usr/ports as well!
>   

Ah ok I will look at this once my install progresses, I just hope that 
4GB is enough for this! I really need to maximize space for /home where 
all my stuff will be deposited to for the moment as I don't trust the 
drive either as it really grinds like crazy but then it might be MS Win 
doing that?

> Good luck!
>
> Roland
>   

Many thanks I will need all the luck I can get! So need to get a nice 
job and get myself a disk array from Sun or so linked to a proper 19" 
rack server.

Not in my uncles house though :-P

Regards,

Kaya