This is the FreeBSD DiskLabel Editor. You should use this editor to create at least the following filesystems: Name Purpose Min Size? Optional? ---- ------- --------- --------- / Root filesystem 20MB No swap Swap space 2 * MEM No /usr System & user files 80MB or more Yes Note: If you do not create a /usr filesystem then your / filesystem will need to be bigger - at least 100MB. This is not recommended as any media errors that may occur during disk I/O to user files will corrupt the filesystem containing vital system files as well. It is for this reason that / is generally kept on its own filesystem, where it's basically considered "read only" by the system and hence a good deal safer. Swap space is a little tricker, and the rule of "2 * MEM" is simply a best-guess approximation and not necessarily accurate for your intended usage of the system. If you intend to use the system heavily in a server or multi-user application, you may be well advised to increase this size. You may also create swap space on multiple drives for a larger "total" swap and this is, in fact, recommended if you have multiple, fast drives for which such load-balancing can only help overall I/O performance. The /usr filesystem should be sized according to what kind of distributions you're trying to load and how many packages you intend to install in locations like /usr/local. You can also make /usr/local a separate filesystem if you don't want to risk filling up your /usr by mistake. Another useful filesystem to create is /var, which contains mail, news printer spool files and other temporary items. It is a popular candidate for a separate paritition and should be sized according to your estimates of the amount of mail, news or spooled print jobs that may be stored there. WARNING: If you do not create a separate filesystem for /var, space for such files will be allocated out of the root (/) filesystem instead. You may therefore wish to make the / partition bigger if you expect a lot of mail or news and do not want to make /var its own partition. If you're new to this installation, you should also first understand how FreeBSD 2.0.5's new "slices" paradigm for looking at disk storage works. It's not very hard to grasp. A "fully qualified slice name", that is the name of the file we open in /dev to talk to the slice, is optionally broken into 3 parts: First you have the disk name. Assume we have two SCSI drives in our system, which gives us `sd0' and `sd1'. Next you have the "Slice" (or "FDISK Partition") number, as seen in the Partition Editor. Assume that our sd0 contains two slices, a FreeBSD slice and a DOS slice. This gives us sd0s1 and sd0s2. Let's also say that sd1 is completely devoted to FreeBSD, so we have only one slice there: sd1s1. Next, if a slice is a FreeBSD slice, you have a number of (confusingly named) "partitions" you can put inside of it. These FreeBSD partitions are where various filesystems or swap areas live, and using our hypothetical two-SCSI-disk machine again, we might have something like the following layout on sd0: Name Mountpoint ---- ---------- sd0s1a / sd0s1b sd0s1e /usr Because of historical convention, there is also a short-cut, or "compatibility slice", that is maintained for easy access to the first FreeBSD slice on a disk for those programs which still don't know how to deal with the new slice scheme. The compatibility slice names for our filesystem above would look like: Name Mountpoint ---- ---------- sd0a / sd0b sd0e /usr FreeBSD automatically maps the compatibility slice to the first FreeBSD slice it finds (in this case, sd0s1). You may have multiple FreeBSD slices on a drive, but only the first one may be the compatibility slice! The compatibility slice will eventually be phased out, but it is still important right now for several reasons: 1. Some programs, as mentioned before, still don't work with the slice paradigm and need time to catch up. 2. The FreeBSD boot blocks are unable to look for a root file system in anything but a compatibility slice right now. This means that our root will always show up on "sd0a" in the above scenario, even though it really lives over on sd0s1a and would otherwise be referred to by its full slice name. Once you understand all this, then the label editor becomes fairly simple. You're either carving up the FreeBSD slices displayed at the top of the screen into smaller pieces (displayed in the middle of the screen) and then putting FreeBSD file systems on them, Or you're just mounting existing partitions/slices into your filesystem hierarchy; this editor lets you do both. Since a DOS partition is also just another slice as far as FreeBSD is concerned, you can mount one into in your filesystem hierarchy just as easily with this editor. For FreeBSD partitions you can also toggle the "newfs" state so that the partitions are either (re)created from scratch or simply checked and mounted (the contents are preserved). When you're done, type `Q' to exit. No actual changes will be made to the disk until you (C)ommit from the Install menu! You're working with what is essentially a copy of the disk label(s), both here and in the FDISK Partition Editor.