From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Mar 8 5:53:25 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C7CC837BFA0 for ; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 05:53:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id IAA267450; Wed, 8 Mar 2000 08:51:41 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <13242.952513560@zippy.cdrom.com> References: <13242.952513560@zippy.cdrom.com> Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2000 08:51:59 -0500 To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" , "Koster, K.J." From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: Sysinstall 'A'uto partitioning Cc: "'Edward Gold'" , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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