New install partition question

[duderino]

Hello all. First time installing any BSD system. Have used Ubuntu and/or Linux Mint last few years.

Question on partitions. With the Linux distros I always used a /home partition for my personal files. I like the extra assurance that installing a new version or updating the OS does not overwrite my pictures and stuff. FreeBSD will be the only OS on this machine.

Should I do a manual partition of FreeBSD? I've read through the handbook and can't find an explanation of the "traditional partitions" mentioned in section 2.7. What are /var, /tmp, and /usr?

Thanks.

 

[wblock@]

Question on partitions. With the Linux distros I always used a /home partition for my personal files. I like the extra assurance that installing a new version or updating the OS does not overwrite my pictures and stuff. FreeBSD will be the only OS on this machine.

FreeBSD users often do in-place upgrades rather than reinstalls, but it really depends on what you like.

Should I do a manual partition of FreeBSD? I've read through the handbook and can't find an explanation of the "traditional partitions" mentioned in section 2.7. What are /var, /tmp, and /usr?

They are filesystems. Just like your separate /home, they keep the contents separated from other things. Creating separate filesystems like that was traditional up until FreeBSD 9 or so. The latest versions default to a combined layout, with everything in a single / filesystem.

 

[trh411]

If you are going to install FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE, you might want to take the ZFS on Root option. zfs will automatically create a separate filesystem (dataset in zfs parlance) for zroot/usr/home. You can then move zroot/usr/home to zroot/home as the http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/filesystems-zfs.html describes. I think you'll find that zfs gives you much more flexibility than UFS while providing additional capabilities.

If you want to stick with UFS, then you can certainly set up multiple partitions to handle /, /home, /tmp, /usr and /var. Just make sure to specify the mountpoints for the filesystems when you are setting up the partitions manually. Since the default for the user home directory is /usr/home, you will have to move it after installation to /home to get what you want.

 

[ShelLuser]

Should I do a manual partition of FreeBSD? I've read through the handbook and can't find an explanation of the "traditional partitions" mentioned in section 2.7. What are /var, /tmp, and /usr?

Personally I'd recommend doing it yourself. A command like gpart may take some time to get used to, but once you have become used to it it'll be very handy to have around. These days I prefer using gpart over Linux' fdisk command for example (which is what I used to rely on when I needed to check up on disk partitioning).

Keeping your data a bit separated in different file systems is always a good idea. Not merely for the separation itself, but also for backup purposes. If you're using UFS then dump and restore are very handy to keep around.

But, as @wblock@ already mentioned it, do keep in mind that upgrading FreeBSD is completely different than performing a Linux upgrade. Depending on how you perform the upgrade you'll most likely notice to have much more control over the entire process.

Now, I have no idea if this maybe of some use to you. But a few months ago I was facing the same problem when I decided to install FreeBSD on my laptop. I then came across this article on setting up a disk on FreeBSD. By our own @wblock@ no less

Not only did this really help me to get a better understanding of the way things worked (I'm used to ZFS, the last time I used UFS was on Sun Solaris) it also helped me to get a better understanding of gpart.