Question Regarding Installing FreeBSD

R

RSSwaim

On my laptop, I have a 1 TB hard drive on which I have created a 500 GB /home directory, and on the other half, I have partitioned it out so that I can run 3 different operating systems. I currently have Linux Mint on one partition (for work), Ubuntu on another partition (for experimenting), and another partition for testing out other operating systems (this is the one I'd like to put FreeBSD on.) All three OS's are configured to use the same /home partition.

So, my question is: Can I install FreeBSD with this configuration? I'd like to use the same /home partition if I can without re-partitioning it again. It's currently using the Ext4 file system. Will this cause any problems that you know of?

(I wasn't sure whether to post this here, or in the Installation forum. I figured that, since my question mainly deals with compatibility issues between Linux and FreeBSD, I'd post it here.)

Thx!
 
ext4 support in FreeBSD requires installing a port sysutils/fusefs-lkl. I haven't used it, so I can't say anything about how easy or not it is to get it well integrated in FreeBSD.
In general, I would not recommend using a non-native filesystem for any of the required filesystems in a default FreeBSD (so, I would not use ext4 for /home). It will most likely cause you trouble / additional work when things gets messed up.

Example: I use ext2 as an additional filesystem on one of my machines, because I can share it between Linux and FreeBSD, and it doesn't require anything extra (in other words: ports) to get working. However, now and then I manage to get in a situation where the machine hangs or does an unclean shutdown (mostly from Linux) thus leaving the ext2 filesystem in a unclean state, but not enough that it won't mount upon startup. So I will happily restart my machine and continue where I left off, until the errors on that filesystem gets many enough that programs start misbehaving. Then I'll remember, and then I have to boot into another operating system to be able to run fsck on that ext2 filesystem, because I have linked some directories from that filesystem to subdirectories in my home directory, which means I can't unmount that filesystem after my user has logged in (also, the machine is awkward to use in single user mode, but that is off topic for this discussion).

One more thing: most common FreeBSD installs require more than one partition: boot / EFI, swap, root filesystem. If your hard drive is GPT partitioned this is not a problem; you can create as many partitions as you wish.
 
OP: just my opinion but if you want to experiment with operation systems, I would use virtualization instead. VirtualBox, VMware, doesn’t matter. Much easier and you don’t introduce the possibility of breaking your “production” machine.
 
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