Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 8 Mar 2000 08:51:59 -0500
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>, "Koster, K.J." <K.J.Koster@kpn.com>
Cc:        "'Edward Gold'" <edgold@mindspring.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Sysinstall 'A'uto partitioning
Message-ID:  <v04210123b4ec03aa59b1@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <13242.952513560@zippy.cdrom.com>
References:  <13242.952513560@zippy.cdrom.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 3:06 AM -0800 3/8/00, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> > For complete newbies, having "two formatting menus" seems weird
> > too, and may be confusing. (I'm quoting one of my housemates).
>
>For complete newbies, you really only want to ask one question up-front:
>
>    "Do you want to use all available disk space for FreeBSD?"
>
>If the answer is yes, you go do the rest on their behalf without
>asking anything more than, perhaps, what kind of installation they
>want (desktop, server, etc).  If the answer is no, then you get into
>the more detailed questions.

I think that gets back to the original observation though.  If you
do have super-simple option for newbies (which sounds like a good
idea to me), then that option should be picking better sizes for
partitions than the current default sizes.

The first time I installed freebsd, I picked numbers that were
a little larger than the defaults for '/' and '/var', and still
found myself needing to redo the entire installation in less
than a week because /var was too small.  That was fine enough
for me, as I just figured it as a learning experience and went
ahead and redid everything.  Newbies might not like learning
experiences quite that much.  (and actually, every time I do a
new install I keep bumping up the size a bit more).

Or are you saying that the newbie option would just use the
entire disk as one partition (the way that MacOS 10 server
does...)?   (well, I guess it'd have to be two partitions, with
one of them being for swap space...).

(I don't think this is a crisis or anything that needs to change
right this second, but assuming the installation is going to stick
with multiple partitions, then I do think that the default sizes
for some of these partitions should be larger).


---
Garance Alistair Drosehn           =   gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer          or  drosih@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?v04210123b4ec03aa59b1>