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[ankhtahr]

Hey everybody,
since some of us were derailing another thread about this topic, I thought, why not open a thread of our own!

I'd like to use this thread for “power users” like me, to discuss software and distros, and for Beginners to ask questions without being harassed about being “noobs” like in some of the Linux forums out there. If you have a question, or want to get some tips, feel free to ask, I'm willing to help!

I'm currently running Arch Linux on my Notebook and my Desktop, my server still runs Debian. I use XMonad as Window Manager, with a XMobar as status bar. I like to perform tasks using a terminal, if possible, and my favourite text editor is vim.

-- Ankhtahr

[cesium133]

I use Ubuntu 12.04 (I think... might be 12.10) on my MythTV computer at home and Debian (specifically, Raspbian) on my Raspberry Pi. I have OpenSuSE installed on my laptop, but I almost never use it (it's flaky on my laptop's hardware, plus I have some software that only runs on Windows).

[ankhtahr]

I used to use OpenSuSE as the first Linux I've tried.
I barely even remember, which Distros I used… I started off with SuSE, tried Ubuntu and didn't like it at all, tried PCLinuxOS and didn't like it, switched over to Mandriva, which I liked, but I had some huge trouble, as my mouse cursor was displayed about 5cm away from where it really was. Then I used Fedora for a while, switched over to Debian, switched over to Sabayon, and lastly I ended up with Arch Linux, and am now so happy that I don't even feel the need to try different distributions anymore.

[pwhodges]

My first Linux was Slackware 3.0.  The one I got a support certification on was Redhat 6.1.  I run a firewall with OpenBSD  .  I have still not found a *nix that I want on my desktop.

[cesium133]

I used to use OpenSuSE as the first Linux I've tried.
I barely even remember, which Distros I used… I started off with SuSE, tried Ubuntu and didn't like it at all, tried PCLinuxOS and didn't like it, switched over to Mandriva, which I liked, but I had some huge trouble, as my mouse cursor was displayed about 5cm away from where it really was. Then I used Fedora for a while, switched over to Debian, switched over to Sabayon, and lastly I ended up with Arch Linux, and am now so happy that I don't even feel the need to try different distributions anymore.

I'm not really a fan of the Ubuntu user interface, but it's fairly easy to set up MythTV on it, so I set it up and then basically ignore that computer and access MythTV from my laptop through the MythWeb interface.

As for the distros I've used... I started with Mandrake (don't remember the version number, but it was the last version to use the 2.4 kernel). I then switched to Slackware, which I used for a while, then I switched to Ubuntu, then I got tired of fiddling with Linux and for the most part I currently use Windows 7.

[celticgeek]

I am currently running Mint 13 on my desktop.  My wife is using Ubuntu 10.4, and my son is using Mint 13.  I am currently running Mint 11 on my laptop, but that's because I haven't gotten around to upgrading yet. 

I have used a large number of distros in my time (it should be noted that this list is not up to date).

I spent a couple of years teaching Linux, using Redhat 6.1-6.3 during that period. 

I have been using Linux pretty consistently for about 10 years.  I do have Windows XP on a separate hard drive, which I only use to download digital media from my camera, since I can't find GNU/Linux drivers to do it. 

My current computer is known as gaidhlig, by the way. 

I use LibreOffice for any office programs that I need, I use GIMP for working with images, I use gftp for file transfers, I use simple scan for scanning documents, I use SoundJuicer for ripping CDs (and I rip them all to .flac), I use Audacity for recording my music, I use Movie player for playing music and videos, I use gedit for text editing, I use Firefox for a browser, and I have Thunderbird mail that I use with my ISP's mail system. 

There, that should qualify for TMI.

[ankhtahr]

I am currently running Mint 13 on my desktop.  My wife is using Ubuntu 10.4, and my son is using Mint 13.  I am currently running Mint 11 on my laptop, but that's because I haven't gotten around to upgrading yet. 

That's what I like so much about Arch Linux. I don't really see the advantages of releases, as the rolling releases system of Arch is working fantastically for me. Most of the big bugs get caught before the packages switch over from [testing] to the ordinary [base]/[extra]/[community] repositories.

I simply type "pacman -Syu" after reading the Arch Linux homepage to make sure there were no gigantic changes in the current packages, and have a nice, up-to-date system.

My notebook is currently called bifrost (I would have called it Bifröst, but I prefer to not use UTF-8 in hostnames…), and I use LibreOffice as well, mainly for school stuff. Whatever I can do using LaTeX I do with it. I much prefer LaTeX's Beamer class over PowerPoint or LibreOffice/OOo Impress. And for ripping CD's I use abcde (a better CD encoder). I insert the CD, type abcde in a terminal, and it downloads all the tags for me, and rips it to FLAC. When I put the music on my mobile I convert it to ogg though. Ogg-Vorbis 320kbit/s still sounds quite good, and takes much less space.
Audacity's a great program, and mplayer is my media player of choice. For listening to music I use a mpd (music player daemon).
For browsing I switch between luakit and Firefox with the Pentadactyl plugin. Luakit is much smaller and resource efficient than Firefox, but it has some trouble rendering some webpages. Well, and emails I usually do using the webinterface of my mail provider or using K 9 Mail on my Android phone, as I have never found a mail client which really works great for what I need. I tried Thunderbird, but it was too big, and I never had the nerve to learn all the hotkeys of mutt. What I really want is a terminal mailclient which can display HTML with w3m (that's something mutt can do at least), which uses a keylayout like vim (and not like nano or such), and is easy to learn.

[MisterHeal]

I've got Arch Linux on my laptop and #! on my desktop. I've used Linux for a couple years, and its used exclusively at my University in my Computer Science program so I wont be leaving it anytime soon. That is a semi-lie because I'm going to throw PCBSD on my laptop during the summer, but I'll be switching over to Mint on my desktop.

My laptop is called Gaben. I'll agree that Arches rolling release is nice, but its not enough to make me stay. I also use LibreOffice, and I'm going to checkout adcde because ripping my Dads cd collection into FLAC would be awesome.

I'm still looking for a good cross platform calendar system so I can keep track of my courses, and when assignments are due etc.

[de_la_Nae]

Jesus I'm out of the loop. I can understand just enough of the conversation to realize how behind-the-times I am.    I'm lazy so stick to Windows. And truth told even though I don't use my system to play games as often as I used to, I'd still need to keep a drive or partition for it.

[celticgeek]

Lots of people keep a Windows partition around just for gaming.  Although Steam is helping to close that loop. 

[ankhtahr]

Even Steam won't help with all these DirectX based games. OpenGL games are relatively easy to port, but DirectX isn't. The co-founder of id software even said that it's probably easier and better for the game developers to start working on making wine work better, than on porting the games to Linux directly.

[Carl-E]

I feel like I did in High School (which was in the 70's) and hung out at the university's computer lab.  I have only a vague idea what you're all talking about, but know that I really want to do it myself, and have no idea how to start. 

So... I have a Toshiba Satellite, AMD V410 processor, 2.3 GHz, with 4 Gig Ram.  I partitioned a hard drive once on an older laptop in an attempt to make a dual boot machine, but that was years ago and I never got to the point of installing the other boot...

Any advice on where to start? 


Or should I leave well enough alone? 

[ankhtahr]

My recommendation for starting would be downloading Linux Mint 14 with Mate Desktop from here. Burn the ISO image onto a DVD (using Nero, CDBurnerXP, or whatever CD Burning suite you use. The Windows tool can't do that afaik.), leave it in the drive, and reboot. Depending on the configuration of your Notebook it should boot from it, or ignore it. If it ignores it, you should look for something like "Boot Menu" or something comparable during the POST messages (these white on black messages which are displayed before Windows starts booting). In this menu you should be able to select your CD drive as boot device. If there is no boot device selection menu at all, you need to enter your Notebook's BIOS setup screen (usually invoked with "DEL" or "F2", and look for something like "Boot device Priority". Move the CD drive to the top of the boot devices and reboot. Most BIOSes display a little help on which keys to use for changing properties.

Then Linux Mint should start booting. You can try it, without changing anything in your current system. Everything should work, but it's rather slow, as everything needs to be loaded directly from the DVD.

If you want to install it, you just need to start the Installer which you can find on the Desktop in the Live environment. The installer is pretty much self explanatory. You need at least two partitions to run Linux. One contains the main file system (the so called "root directory", which is denoted as "/"), the other to be used as "swap". The swap partition, which serves as virtual RAM, should be a bit bigger than your RAM, as this partition is where your RAM is being saved to if you put your system into hibernate.

Well, and a friend of mine had some trouble with the Installer once, as it complained about "unmounting" the partitions before changing them. If you happen to get such a message, open the file manager, and press the small eject buttons next to the partitions in the panel on the left side. Then it should work.

Good luck, and have fun!

[cesium133]

Burn the ISO image onto a DVD (using Nero, CDBurnerXP, or whatever CD Burning suite you use. The Windows tool can't do that afaik.),

It depends on what version of Windows he has. XP doesn't burn ISO images, 7 does. I don't remember whether Vista does or not.

[snalin]

The easiest thing is to do the same, but boot/install from an USB drive (if you have a big enough usd pin - depending on your distro size, 1 or 2 gigs should often be more than enough). Don't have to do the DVD-burning hassle. My newest computer doesn't even have a DVD drive, and since I got it changed to that a couple of months ago, I have never missed it.

On using Linux for the first time; I'd not go straight out and install it, but run it from an USB/DVD - you usually get a working version with Firefox installed, so you can play around with it without having to commit a re-partitioning of the hard-drive. If you decide to go for it, depending on what you are using it for, you'll want to get lightly to moderately familiar with the workings of the command line. With many distros (Ubuntu amongst others), you'll have any open source (and maybe free, depending on setting) program available for instant download from a command line install command - no more having to bother going online and finding an install file . It's generally easier to install stuff either through the bash command line or though an download/install manager than the way you are used to from other OSes (double-clicking the .exe, following instructions).

There's some things you should be aware of from the get-go. First of all, you can choose what graphical user interface (like Mate Desktop mentioned above) you want - try a couple before you decide. Secondarily, if there's any Windows software that you must have, use Wine ("Wine Is Not an Emulator" might be the best looping acronym ever).

[Jimor]

My laptop died from some kind of HD corruption where it wouldn't load in the OS (Windows Vista), and the DVD drive was iffy enough I couldn't get the Windows Install disc to fully function. So I used a rescue linux distro on a USB stick to successfully pull the files (it was a secondary computer, so nothing important was on it, I just want the opportunity to check through the files to make sure), then used the USB stick to successfully install Mint Linux on the original hard drive. The HD is probably slowly dying, so I'm still not going to have anything important here, but at least I can web browse and futz around with Linux a bit when the main desktop is in use by others or rendering video files. If this HD does completely die, I have an old HD installed in a USB interface box I can reload the OS onto and run it from that.

I've installed WINE, but haven't put it through any tests yet. I bought this laptop in 2007 and really worked it hard with video work until I got the new desktop last year, so any extra time I get with it is definitely bonus time. I'll probably also install DOSBox and play some classic games, and test drive some other open-source programs, particularly video/media software.

[celticgeek]

I finally installed Mint 14 on my laptop.  It seems to be pretty nice, although when it comes back from "sleep" mode (as in when the computer shuts down the screen after a period of time) the "screen" does not come back.  The cursor shows up, but the desktop does not come back on, and I have to shut the computer off and restart it.  This is kind of a pain, although I have not checked to see if there is anything that will help this problem. 

Anyhow, I like Mint 14. 

[mtmerrick]

i've been meaning to put mint on my computer as a dualboot. have the ISO on my desktop and everything. just can't seem to get around to it.

i had a ubuntu dualboot for a while but never really got into it, wiped it to try out the windows 8 previews.

just need to find a good UI for linux, cuz neo-gnome and unity suck.

[celticgeek]

I'm using KDE, but I understand that cinnamon is pretty good, too.

[mtmerrick]

i've been wanting to try cinnamon...

i tried KDE for a while. it feels like a throwback to XP or older, but i think i would've adjusted if the freakin windows key had opened the start menu! if it works on something as different as Unity, it should work on KDE!

Also, has anyone seen Ubuntu Touch For Mobile? Thoughts?

[ankhtahr]

I'm a fan of the Mate desktop. It's a fork of Gnome 2.3, which is still being developed further. Gnome 3 sucks, Unity sucks as well. Cinnamon is a Linux Mint only project, which makes it little unsympathetic to me. KDE4/Plasma is too big imho. I prefer lightweight software, and KDE is pretty much the opposite. XFCE is nice too, as is LXDE, so it's hard to decide which is better. XFCE is more self containing, while LXDE is more modular. I prefer XFCE, if it's about having a complete Desktop Manager, but LXDE utilities work great on other WMs too. On all my PCs I use XMonad as window manager. Getting used to it is pretty difficult, but then it's a absolutely amazing concept; also it's written in Haskell.

[mtmerrick]

I'm not familiar with XMonad...

*googles*

Interesting, so it's like the ill-fated cornerstone for android?

[ankhtahr]

I don't really understand what you mean by this. XMonad is very lightweight, and is a tiling window manager. This means, that it organises the windows for you. You just have to choose the tiling mode, and the windows are arranged. Maybe changing the ratio between the Windows with Mod+J and Mod+K, but then everything is fine. No moving windows around all the time. Though you can set some windows to be floating, which is good for popup windows and such.

Here's a screenshot of my current layout. The blue border shows which window has the focus currently, the other terminal windows have a slightly reduced brightness when they're out of focus.

Edit: wait, maybe I should have included the screenshot (doh!):

(click to show/hide)

[mtmerrick]

Cornerstone for android, a brilliant 3rd party android OS level mod that provides android with true multitasking:

http://www.onskreen.com/cornerstone/

Was absolutely amazing until Google shut them down, saying it "corrupted" the android experience. Windows 8 &  Samsung's Multi-Window then proceeded to rip them off.

This looks a lot like that to me, at first glance.

[ankhtahr]

Well, as far as I can see, Cornerstone has only this one fixed layout, while with XMonad you can configure various layouts, see here. Also XMonad is nearly purely keyboard driven, and it also has a great support for multiple monitors. Working with XMonad on a three monitor setup is absolutely amazing. Also you have 9 workspaces, between you can switch easily by pressing Mod-1 to Mod-9 (you can configure, which key to use as modificator. In the standard configuration it's Alt, but many configure it to use the Windows key. As many of my keyboards lack a Windows key I still use Alt). These workspaces can be configured any way you like. You can configure it, so that special windows get pulled to a workspace immediately (which is what I do. I pull my network manager and htop to workspace 9 automatically on boot), or that specific windows automatically set the workspace to a specific layout. That was usually done some time ago, before GIMP introduced the One-Window mode. If you started Gimp without any further configuration, it usually divided into the panel as main window, the workspace and the layers window as small windows on the right. With a few configuration tricks you could set XMonad up, to automatically arrange the windows in a three panel layout, divided vertically. Worked great, but it's unnecessary now.

[mtmerrick]

Cornerstone was a bit more versatile than what you think, but I'm seeing how XMonad works now. Not for me I'm afraid. I need me a good GUI,  command line is something to be used occasionally, not always in my book.

[ankhtahr]

I love my z-shell. I consider commandline applications to be more efficient for many tasks. I work a lot faster with my keyboard, than with my mouse. I like my keyboards. That's why I have so many of them!

 And XMonad works great for most GUI programs as well.

[Eternal_Newbie]

I'm still looking for a good cross platform calendar system so I can keep track of my courses, and when assignments are due etc.

I haven't used it recently, but AFAIK the nearest thing to that I have found is the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird and Mozilla Seamonkey. You should be able to sync it with Google Calender or any or calendering system that supports CalDav

I dual boot and Win7 and  Slackware 13.37 but spend most of the time in Win 7 these days. Haven't gotten round to updating to Slackware 14. Used Slackware since 10.1 .  My main reason for using Slackware is that it was the only Distro that would actually install on my PC at the time. Apparently USB keyboards were too revolutionary a concept for the Debian, Ubuntu, SuSe and Fedora installers of the time.

EDIT clarification, spelling

[Pilchard123]

So I was downloading Ubuntu when the phone rings and my dodgy ADSL filters drop the connection, ending and corrupting the download at T-1m30s of a three-hour download.

[mtmerrick]

Oh god. Ouch.

[snalin]

yeah, torrenting it is probably a much better idea.

[mtmerrick]

Is that even an option? I know a lot of US ISPs throttle or even disconnect your service if you touch a torrent....

[Pilchard123]

Virgin seem to be okay with it, but then I'm in the UK and my connection is poor enough that throttling would probably improve the speeds I get.

Also, another pet peeve (I'm like a crazy old woman with hundreds of cats, but with peeves) is people that seem to think torrenting ≡ piracy.

[snalin]

Is that even an option? I know a lot of US ISPs throttle or even disconnect your service if you touch a torrent....

Oh God your country is so stupid at times it's baffling.

[mtmerrick]

No arguments there. Seriously, look up Six Strikes, its downright shameful. 

[pwhodges]

Virgin seem to be okay with it, but then I'm in the UK and my connection is poor enough that throttling would probably improve the speeds I get.

I'm in the UK and wouldn't touch Virgin with a bargepole.  Where does the money you pay them go?  Well, I have cable outside the house but not connected, so they send me a multi-page full-colour brochure and begging letter by mail about every two weeks, year in, year out.  And sometimes one to my wife as well (we have different names). 

I have an FTTC connection via Zen Internet, which is admittedly not cheap, but I get a lot of things for the money (£35 a month - but in the past I've paid more for a slower service, so things are going the right way); sadly I'm at the very end of the line from the cabinet, so I "only" get 55Mbps (unthrottled under any circumstances).  I also have limited downloads (currently 200GB/month, but uploads are unlimited); most competitors these days have unlimited downloads, but subject to a "fair usage policy", which in practice means means that they can throttle or limit you at their convenience.

[Pilchard123]

I don't like them either. We have really cheap mobile contracts (we're probably the only ones still on them) because we've been with them so long and we have an Internet connection through them, but I've been trying to persuade my parents to switch to Infinity (BT's the only fibre provider that I know of in the area). Due to various shenanigans on Virgin's part, this has become more likely over that last few months, but inertia is proving difficult to overcome.

[pwhodges]

BT's Infinity advertising makes it seem they are the only fibre provider - but in fact any ADSL supplier which uses BT Openreach as their carrier can offer the FTTC connection (e.g. Zen); but BT's Infinity deal is pretty good for most people (it's missing stuff I use, though, like the multiple routed IP addresses which I use for servers)

[Pilchard123]

I did not know that. Thanks!

EDIT: So the download finally completes successfully. The installer fails four times and when it eventually gets through, Compiz won't work. I'm inclined to blame VirtualBox, but this is not going well so far. To Debian (yes, I know Ubuntu is based on Debian).

All I wanted was to be able to test (and compile, if possible) stuff in Linux without having to reboot each time...

[Bluesummers]

I used SuSE 9.3 for a short while, but when I realized the wine emulator sucked ass, I went back to my microsoft confort zone.

[Bedrock]

Hey folks... late to the party. I'm a Linux/Unix System Administrator so I've used a few distros over the years. I currently work with CentOS/Red Hat Enterprise 4/5/6 at work, but I use Mint 14 on my desktop, and fedora 18 on my work laptop. I prefer the look and feel of KDE over most desktops, but Mint's cinnamon is not too shabby as others have stated. I do look forward to the Linux Steam client, but I rarely play games anymore to be honest. 

[ankhtahr]

KDE's Plasma seems too bloated to me. I've started my Linux “career” with KDE 3, but even that was rather big. On the other hand, I guess I'm slightly biased. Can't get much more lightweight, than with a WM without any menus.

[pwhodges]

I'm out of touch with Linux.  A bit over ten years ago I was a Red Hat Certified Engineer (got the certificates and badges to prove it), but I've not actually used it since.  I do run an OpenBSD machine at work, but that's just a firewall, not doing anything more than that - all the rest of my servers run Windows.  At home I'm planning, but never quite getting around to, building a machine with Fedora and Planet CCRMA for some specialist audio work using some programs that require that environment.

However, in about 10 days I will take delivery of £150,000-worth of Dell equipment for a project in the department, which I will have to install and keep running.  It's based round a blade chassis containing a cluster with 256 cores with 8GB of memory each, and a number of ancillary machines, all connected with Infiniband 40Gbps networking.  There's a 200TB Raid storage, which will be connected using 10Gbps iSCSI (four parallel links are available, so 40Gbps again overall).  I'm pretty sure we'll be installing CentOS throughout, but maybe actual Red Hat, if the uni's licence is felt to cover it.  Oh, and there's a 50TB Raid with a control machine in a different part of town for off-site backup of critical data - the connection to that is limited to the 1Gbps of connections to the University's backbone.   We had to add new capacity to the computer room's air conditioning to accommodate this lot.  The data being analysed is genomes - not genes, but whole genomes.

I think I need to do a little revision later this week...

[Masterpiece]

Supercomputers sound wonderful.

[Friendzoning Misandrist]

I'm currently running Xubuntu 12.10 as my main OS on my desktop, although I do boot into Win7 pretty often because I find game performance in WINE to be meh.
In the past I've used Fedora, Mint, and Ku/Lu/Ubuntu.

I recently installed Arch Linux on my notebook, I haven't used it enough to form a real opinion on it, but it seems nice and I like the concept of a rolling release system.

[bhtooefr]

Personally, I'm not a fan of most *nixes on the desktop (NeXTSTEP and its descendants being the sole exception), but they are quite effective for servers.

Just spent the weekend (well, and a little bit yesterday) migrating things from an old Pentium III box running Ubuntu Server 10.04, to a Dell CS24-SC (dual Xeon L5420 - basically, dual Core 2 Quad 2.5 GHz) running FreeBSD 9.1.

I would've stuck with Ubuntu, but I wanted to move to ZFS, and I didn't want to take the chances that come with ZFS root on Linux. And, while I liked OpenSolaris, that whole universe has become a wasteland of nearly abandoned software (for the Illumos side of the fork) and paywalls for security updates (for the Oracle side of the fork), it seems.

(I would've liked a rolling release model, although that comes with downsides too... then again, Ports has those same downsides (have to check the UPDATING file before updating) plus having to compile everything to keep up to date...)

[ankhtahr]

What are the reasons for wanting ZFS so bad? I'm quite happy with ext4.

[bhtooefr]

Let's see...

RAIDZ is like RAID 5 but integrated into the filesystem (reducing overhead (although ZFS is rather notorious for being a RAM hog for other reasons), increasing safety (no write hole), and reducing rebuild time of a degraded array if the pool wasn't entirely full)
The storage pool system makes for much greater flexibility in how the filesystem is managed (I want a new filesystem that's compressed and with certain security options enabled? Just make it, no partitioning required, and set a mountpoint) Yes, I know, Linux does have LVM, but it's nowhere near as flexible, and requires much more planning ahead. (Although, ZFS on FreeBSD requires more planning than it does on Solaris - a boot partition and a swap partition have to be outside of the ZFS pool (you COULD put swap inside the ZFS pool, but there's apparently a race condition in the FreeBSD kernel, that means that swapping to ZFS can freeze the system. Still, a tiny boot partition with the ZFS bootloader, and a swap partition, isn't that much outside of ZFS.)
Snapshot support is nothing short of excellent (major system change? Take a snapshot of your root filesystem beforehand, and then if the shit hit the fan, just boot from the snapshot). I don't think you can do that with a LVM snapshot?

Here's what I've got now:

Code: [Select]

root@uncannyvalley:/home/bhtooefr # zfs list
NAME                          USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
zroot                        36.4G  1.69T   192K  /zroot
zroot/ROOT                    383M  1.69T   383M  /
zroot/home                   13.2G  1.69T  13.2G  /home
zroot/srv                    18.1G  1.69T  2.76G  /srv
zroot/srv/torrent             597K  1.69T   213K  /srv/torrent
zroot/srv/torrent/downloads   192K  1.69T   192K  /srv/torrent/downloads
zroot/srv/torrent/watch       192K  1.69T   192K  /srv/torrent/watch
zroot/srv/www                15.3G  1.69T  15.3G  /srv/www
zroot/tmp                     485K  1.69T   485K  /tmp
zroot/usr                    4.15G  1.69T   366M  /usr
zroot/usr/local               975M  1.69T   975M  /usr/local
zroot/usr/obj                 192K  1.69T   192K  /usr/obj
zroot/usr/ports              2.24G  1.69T  1.86G  /usr/ports
zroot/usr/ports/distfiles     387M  1.69T   387M  /usr/ports/distfiles
zroot/usr/ports/packages      202K  1.69T   202K  /usr/ports/packages
zroot/usr/src                 615M  1.69T   615M  /usr/src
zroot/var                     568M  1.69T  3.43M  /var
zroot/var/crash               197K  1.69T   197K  /var/crash
zroot/var/db                  560M  1.69T   551M  /var/db
zroot/var/db/pkg             9.15M  1.69T  9.15M  /var/db/pkg
zroot/var/empty               192K  1.69T   192K  /var/empty
zroot/var/log                3.08M  1.69T  3.08M  /var/log
zroot/var/mail                202K  1.69T   202K  /var/mail
zroot/var/run                 464K  1.69T   464K  /var/run
zroot/var/tmp                 202K  1.69T   202K  /var/tmp

You might notice that they all have the same available space - they're sharing the same storage, and grow and shrink on demand. I could constrain any of them as needed, but don't see the need right now. (The torrent directories aren't populated, mind you.) Some of them (/var/log, for instance) are compressed at the filesystem level, and it's almost as easy to make a filesystem on ZFS with custom attributes as it is to make a directory.

[Bedrock]

I have not messed with ZFS much to be honest so I may do that as a project soon just to see the difference between the two and if there is a benefit in an enterprise environment over ext4.

[Method of Madness]

I'm about to order a Samsung Chromebook for the fall. It won't be my main computer, my giant Windows 7 laptop will still have that, but I'll use it for travel/notes in class, etc. The reason I bring that up here is I was thinking of putting Linux on it. Does anyone know anything about Chrubuntu?