Date: Sun, 29 Nov 1998 00:34:55 -0500 (EST) From: "Joe \"Marcus\" Clarke" <marcus@jaguar.ir.miami.edu> To: List Account Management <listaccount@home.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Installation advice needed - Fat32 /usr, /var? Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.4.05.9811290027310.15373-100000@jaguar.ir.miami.edu> In-Reply-To: <3660DA94.C1E9C033@home.com>
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This sounds bad to begin with first of all. I'm not sure of all the pitfalls that can be encountered using FAT32 in place of ffs, but I can name a BIG one. FAT32 does NOT support unix permissions. All files will be executable, and readable by everyone. This has to cause problems with some installs. Plus, ffs offers a bunch of performance boosts over FAT filesystems. I'm not sure if the caching that ffs uses applies to FAT, but I bet it doesn't. Meaning, when you right to an ffs filesystem, FreeBSD doesn't write the data right away. It caches it, so that actual disk seeks are reduced. FAT also doesn't support quotas, and Windows has a way of mangling long filenames. Plus, I don't believe 98 is case sensitive. You could end up screwing up your UNIX program names. I'd stich with ffs for FreeBSD...maybe trash NT. I mean, with 98 you have games, and FreeBSD gives you everything else. What's the point of having NT at all these days? Joe Clarke On Sat, 28 Nov 1998, List Account Management wrote: > Hi all.. > > Here's a food for thought question :) With all my work files safely > backed up, and my OSes of choice ready and waiting, I have decided it is > time to re-think my partition implementation and start over. > > I have Windows 98, NT4 Workstation, and FreeBSD3.0-RELEASE > > I have run all of these quite successfully by themselves... However, I > would like to give them more common ground than I have in the past. I > have two fixed drives in this machine... A 1220MB, and an 8440MB. > > I would like to use the 1220 essentially as my boot drive for all three > OSes, using a boot manager to set a partition active. The 8440 will be > the common ground, housing all of my projects, mail, and OS-specific > installed application files. I am not really interested in > re-partitioning my 8440, as partitions past the primary are invisible to > FreeBSD anyway, and drives larger than 8 GB are notoriously difficult to > partition. > > My question, then... Is (if the following is even possible).. What would > be the quickest and easiest way to install (yes, I plan to wipe FreeBSD > and start clean) FreeBSD in such a way that only the core components > (ie, swap, root, /etc and the other miscellaneous system files needed > for boot/logon) are installed to the FreeBSD native slices, and, AT > INSTALL TIME, have directories on my FAT32 drive be mounted as /usr and > /var? (So, I want to AVOID creating native /usr and /var slices) > > If it's not possible to get the installer to do this, am I then stuck > with creating small versions of /usr and /var on my 1220 meg drive, > then, after install, edit my login scripts to mount my FAT32 drive, and > install additional packages somewhere there? > > I will likely be able to fight my way through it... BUT... It has been > quite some time since I've installed FreeBSD on any machine, and I'd > like to eliminate as much hassle as I can before I get going :) > > Thanks > > Ryan Thompson > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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