Question regarding translating FreeBSD

[Manish Jain]

On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 11:15 PM, victoriabalchik--- via freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org> wrote:
Hello and excuse me if my question has been answered somewhere else, but I havent found out where.You see, I have interest in FreeBSD and Unix-like OS-es for a long time. I wish to contribute to the FreeBSD community, since I consider it  WONDERFUL and welcoming, almost like a family. I wish to translate various documents (I have decided to start with Handbook) from English to Bulgarian, my native tongue. I was however, unable to figure out how and whom to contact, as the emails provided for the Bulgarian translating efforts were invalid. Yes, invalid. So, how do I start editing the document for translation? Where is the BSD translations central? Thank you in advance!Daniel, sunny Bulgaria


Hi Victoria,

ZFS is easy to install if one is ready to dedicate the entire disk to
the FreeBSD installation. But most people do not want that - most
people can only give FreeBSD a part of the disk. It turns out that it
is not possible to install FreeBSD+ZFS on a portion of a disk. So if you
can only afford to dedicate part of the disk, you are in bad luck.

But there is hope for those who can dedicate partial disks only, as long
as there is a spare slice somwehere. Slice is the BSD term for DOS
primary partitions. The spare slice could be on the same disk, or
another hard disk in the computer, or a removable USB pen drive.

Please note that MBR disks are limited to a maximum of 4 slices.
GPT disks are not limited in the number of slices, but introduce
phenomenal problems for multi-boot environments. If you need multiple
operating systems on your disk, it is significantly easier to use MBR
partitioning - and then remember that you can have just 4 slices; which
effectively means a practical maximum of 3 operating systems on one
single disk. For most people, this is good enough - I have never come
across anyone who needed more than 3 operating systems on his/her disk.

Using online documentation, I successfully set up a FreeBSD (ZFS) box on
a disk with a spare slice of 30 GB. The disk already had an existing
Windows installation and a FreeBSD (UFS) installation. The UFS
installation was migrated into the spare slice, and then the original
UFS slice was deleted.

If you need to set up FreeBSD (ZFS) on a partial disk, please let me
know. I can give good advice, besides a set of scripts which I wrote to
perform the setup painlessly. The scripts have now run quite a few times
and work wonderfully.

Please note though that ZFS does not inherently provide any performance
benefit over UFS, at least on the desktop. The primary advantage of ZFS
is data integrity, particularly important for systems which could suffer
from improper shutdowns.

Regards
Manish Jain