How much space is enough? Are the auto settings good? Dangerously Dedicated?

First off. FreeBSD handles drives in a manner that would make most MS Windows users drop a load in thier pants. When installing, the first thing you will wind up doing is building the partions. This is not unlike DOS/FAT. You will select the portion of your disk that will be dedicated to FreeBSD. Personally I've never dual booted a FreeBSD machine so I've always opted for the option "A" - "Use entire disk". If you choose this option, it will ask you if you want it dedicated to FreeBSD. Here's the only kicker..The answer is "YES" if you ever intend on putting another OS on that machine without doing a format/reinstall and "NO" if it's just going to be a FreeBSD machine until it's next life.

The Slice Editor-
FreeBSD divides it's drivespace into slices. Now this is simiar to the concept in DOS for C: D: & E: for example, however FreeBSD will allow you to pick any nomenclature you want (but it won't work if you go too wacky) and will even *Gasp!* let you put slices WITHIN each other. This would be compareable to saying that you wanted a 2gb slice in C:\ and like a 3gb slice at C:\Program Files. How about them apples?

What I always do is rather simple and could prove as a good guideline for you in your first install. Set up a swap partition first. Use a size that is 2.5times the amount of RAM you have..64MB ram? Then use a 160MB Swap. Then choose a "/" (root) partition. anything from about 40M->100M oughtta do it fine.. It really doesn't carry alot of data, just most of your basic programs for things like mkdir,rm,cat ..etc.. Then set up your "/var" directory. This is your temp space, it's also where mail is likely to head so keep those in mind. I usually put a couple hundred MB in there and move on. If the machine isn't going to have alot of user accounts, you could probably get away with like 50MB but you'll have to keep an eye on it. Next will be your "/usr" directory. This is a tough one. I'd say start with 500MB and then plan on another 800MB if you are going to use X and then maybe another 500MB if you are going to install alot of stuff. Me? I keep a 3gb "/usr", I just love installing software. Finally, you'll want a place to put the home directories. If you don't create a "/home" then the home directories will go under "/" which, unless you made that a big partition, can be bad. I usually just slap whatever space I have left into this partition. So in summary of what I have on my work machine (128MB ram):

	SWAP  -  320MB
	/     -  100MB
	/var  -  400MB
	/usr  - 3000MB
	/home - everything else (20GB in my case)
	

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