∂ : Action to Take : Allocate disk space for filesystems.
This will take some explanation and it's never easy for a beginner. I will do my best to make this painless.
- Set everything other than the / ( root ) filesystem to 0 and clear the little name tag fields where it says “/export/home” and “swap”. Do not touch the root file system name which is just a forward slash.
- Now give the root filesystem plenty of room. Like well over the suggested dosage there. I think that 6 GB is a good number but if you are swimming in disk space then make it 10 GB. You just need to know that the /var filesystem is contained in there also and a lot of software patches and logging happens there. Do not get left with a root filesystem that fills up! Think bigger is better here.
- Do not bother trying to figure out what a slice is and just take my word for it that it is a disk region bounded by physical cylinders on the disk. Now go to the slice 1 area and type in “swap” there just like the picture below.
- Fill in a nice healthy size for swap of about twice your memory. Do not exceed 4GB of swap as that serves little purpose. There are more arguments over this than can be imagined and I hope that your machine has enough memory ( 512MB or more ) and that you can allocate twice as much for swap. If you have more than 2GB of memory then allocate 4GB of swap. If you have more than 2GB of memory then allocate 4GB of swap. Its not a perfect world and I'd love to discuss it on some other day.
- Go to slice 5 and fill in the name “/opt” there. Give it 2GB of disk if you can. This is where a lot of optional software gets installed. At the very least there are 1600+ titles of software packages at Blastwave.org and they all go in there. Make plenty of room.
- If this machine will have development software for programmers ( like me ) then you need to create a place for Sun Studio 11 tools as well as other revisions like Sun ONE Studio 10. I recommended a separate filesystem entirely but you don't have to do this. Either create a new filesystem in slice 6 called “/opt/studio” or add more disk space to /opt. This one is up to you!
- Create a place for users. Their home directories will go into someplace and /export/home is a good location. Take a look at the picture below and allocate space accordingly.
- Lastly, and this will be a leap of faith for you, set aside a small 32MB area in slice 4. If you decide that you want to make your filesystems mirrored and thus somewhat redundant someday, then you will need an area for something called “metadevice databases”. Does that sound mysterious or what? Just allocate the space there and someday you may thank me for it.
A few things that you need to know before you plow forwards here. Firstly, if you are an advanced user, you can allocate a massive slice at slice 3 that is large enough to hold ALL of your root slice. So if you created a 6GB root slice ( that is slice 0 in the picture ) then you
may allocate at least 6GB in slice 3 also. Don't bother to name it anything special because we are not going to use it as an active mounted file system. Just create it for something super special called “live update”. If you have the disk space to spare then I highly recommend that you set aside a place for “live update” which can allow you to upgrade the whole operating system in the future and it will happen live while you are up and running. That, my friend, is cool enough to prepare for.
<< previous
next >>
