As I have read so far, it is good to have as big a /usr dir as possibe in the case of smaller disks anyway.
Here's the situation:
I have a pentium 166 with 32 megs o' ram and a 2 gig drive. Im going to be installing from floppies. This is just going to be a sandbox system so I can more or less poke around and see how everything works.
Just curious as to what would be a good partitioning scheme.
Maybe get half the disk for /usr, 128 mb swap and the rest...?
I dont know really, looking for suggestions.
Maybe I dont need the whole source tree, I dont know. I have no use for anything dealing with X or a a desktop environment...
Haaaalp!!

thanks in advance

oh yea, its fbsd 5.3

or have a swap and a "/" dir that can move around in size as it needs to? I dont really need much of a /home dir, I dont plan on having much in the way of personal files....?

For a sandbox system...

I would either go with one large partition for / (and the swap of course)

Or a small / (~200M) and the rest in /usr (be sure to link /home to /usr/home so you don't fill the /)

Anything more complex than that, on a system where you don't have a specific knowedge of your needs, is going to bite you later.

I'd set up 256MB swap and the rest as / , I wouldn't bother segmenting it any further

Definitely just / and swap.

This is the BSD forum right?

The way you bust up your disk is directly related to what the system is going to be doing, but the installer will suggest how you should break up your disk. On a playpen like that one, I'd go with something like this:

You can get by with less on /var if you make sure not to have any system mail going to local users and make sure to keep your log files cleaned up. Note that databases will install their files to /var, so keep that in mind if you're going to be doing anything like MySQL or whatever.

The reasons for having your partitions broken up are more than historic, though they seem to be lost on the majority of people that would offer advice on such things. If you need more info, I'd suggest you man hier and read throughly.

No need to be condescending sigsegv... some of us who made recommendations for few partitions are more than aware of the reasons for multiple ones. And on a system that was being setup for real work we would have recommended a far different setup. From the description being given this computer is going to be used to play with FreeBSD and explore how it works. We have no way of knowing what will be run during the exploration.

Rather than specify partition information that may be wrong for the desired uses, we (or at least I) chose to offer the advice of one large partition.

If he comes back and says he wants to set the computer up for a specific chore and not for playing... then we could set up a correct scheme for his needs.

Just because we didn't recommend multiple partitions does not mean we aren't aware of their benefits. I can't think of a single computer in my house which lacks the standard four partitions (/, /tmp, /var, /usr) nor am I fresh from using Linux either -- just celebrated my fifth full year of FreeBSD as my main operating system a few weeks ago.

Splitting up with the 4 + swap partitions will leave the OP with 1.5 gig for /usr, minus what's loaded for 5.3. Maybe 500-750meg free space? Lots of space is wasted on those multiple partitons that may be needed if additional software is added or a portsupgrade is performed. No sense taking the chance.

I once split up a 6gig on an older version, (but had X and WindowMaker, ~1gig /home) got close to running out of room during portsupgrade. I made my recomendation from previous experience. Greg Lehey doesn't recommend creating all those partitions anymore.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I seriously doubt that the user is going to be broken by the 50M or so that's going to be sitting around on /var, but I suppose it could happen. What could also happen is a user doing something they didn't mean to do and filling their home directory, which, will fill /, /var and /tmp ... Woops. Or how about fs corruption on /home (or the place the /home symlink points to)? No problem. Your worst case scenario is that you lose some data off /home, and likely /usr, which sucks but certainly isn't the end of the world. Unless of course you have one big / partition. Then you've (potentially) lost data all over the place.

Yes, and every time Greg Lehey doesn't recommend creating all those partitions anymore we have to sit through the conversation that we're having right now about the rights and wrongs of doing it one way or the other and how quotas can save the world. Blah...

There's a lot more cons than pros from where I sit. This isn't 1997. Storage is less than $1/GB ... If you don't have enough, buy more.

Note to frob23 -- I wasn't trying to be condescending, though I regularly come across that way. It wasn't intentional, and I apologize if you took offense.

No problem... I'm not offended. It was just the first line of your post. I probably would have laughed it you had used the smiley because I knew exactly where you were going. But the rolling-eyes seemed to imply that "gosh... I can't believe I need to say this" kind-of attitude.

I know you are making some strong points (which I never disagreed with) about the fail-safe nature of the computer. But this machine (at least from how I interperted the post) isn't going to have a bunch of important data or function. I guess I was just thinking along the lines of it not being a major problem to blast the whole disk clean and reinstall if he needed to.

I take the stability of "toy" systems a lot less seriously then something I need to work or depend on.

sigsegv............ it's... a.... 2gig... play.... box.... No need to get bent out of shape. With a bigger drive, I think we can all agree with more partitions.

Really depends on the application doesn't it?

Even with a big drive, if I'm not interested in whats on the drive I'll just bung in a single root partition. The only time I get fancy is if its a development box in which case I'll do root and home to make backups and upgrades easier. My idea of an upgrade by the way is going from Red Hat 7.2 to Mandrake 10.0.

just an update, but the / and swap scheme are going just fine! This is one hell of an operating system! I have an old Ath 800mHz system that I decided to try to raise from the dead. Somehow I now have it running again. I have to flash the bios to get some modern large disk support, but when thats done its getting an 80 gig so I can actualy start using it.
Thanks for the input, its awsome to see arguements that realy make valid points. There's something different about the bsd community that I like. Just seems more to the point. Less elite-ism, more straight facts.
The pentium system is getting obsd next i think. Ya know, just to play with.
Again, thank you everyone!