Hello everyone. I just wanted to relate that my quest for speed on a budget has finally been rewarded! A friend of mine loaned me his copy of last month's (September's) Linux Format. One of the books they rated highly was FreeBSD Unleashed, 2nd Edition. I happened to find a copy of the first edition selling at half price so picked it up. It is indeed a good book, not only for FreeBSD, but for Linux as well.

Anyways, I am never totally satisfied with the speed of my computer, but hey, it's a never ending cycle once you are in the hardware upgrade game. I have a Pentium II 333 MHz with a twenty gig and a four gig IDE. I was reading in the FreeBSD book that the (/) partition only needs to be around 100 megs. Also that the swap partition should be strategically placed at the beginning of the fastest, or least used hard drive. Another thing I picked up is that you should install only the programs you need. There are a zillion tips in this book. I tried installing the BSD as instructed and it was lightning-fast. But difficult. So, I applied all the principles I learned in reinstalling Mandrake Linux. Here's how I divided up the space.

/dev/hda1 /boot 25 M
/dev/hda5 / 100 M
/dev/hda6 /var 3800 M

/dev/hdb1 /swap 250 M
/dev/hdb5 /usr 3900 M
/dev/hdb6 /home 14800 M


Lo and behold -- Linux is now lightning-fast too. And I haven't even recompiled the kernel yet! What a fool I've been.