Partitioning: What? Why? When? and How?

[Mikuro]

symbollic links? like aliases?

Ah, excuse me. Symbolic links are like aliases, but from the Unix side of OS X (aliases came from the Mac side). Many apps these days don't know what to do with aliases, but symbolic links operate at a lower level, and thus are more reliable (but not as flexible).

You can make symbolic links from the command line, or with third-party tools. I use and recommend Symbolic Linker, which allows you to make symbolic links of files in the Finder via contextual menu.

 

[Lt Major Burns]

as fryke predicited, i didn't allow enough space for swap and VM. also, the fact that all the applications were on a different partition did cause problems, little errors, strange glitches etc.

for anyone ho may read this in the future, Home folder works just dandy anywhere you want it, as long as you 'bless' it from NetInfo Manager.

applications really like to be on the system partition. it's not totally unstable, but it's certainly not rock solid. i would therefore reccomend against it.

and leave at least 20gb for Vm, just in case.

 

[Mikuro]

I've never had issues putting apps on other partitions. Then again, I've never moved my entire Applications folder, just a bunch of third-party apps. What kind of problems did you have? Was it just with Apple's apps or third-party apps as well?

i had another idea. have two partitions, one with just os x on, and another with osx and all your applications installed to. keep the one with applications attached clean, don't use it. then, use the one without apps as your day to day build, with all your apps in the dock etc being from the build with the apps. this way, the everyday os can be wiped when ever you want, and the apps still have their proper libraries. i'm going to try this i think.

If you mean to have the applications use the libraries on their own partition instead of the boot partition, that won't work. They'll still store their preferences in the active system and user libraries, which will be on the boot volume (at least, they will unless you use more tricks to put them somewhere else!). Very few programs will store files in locations relative to the application itself; most will use locations relative to the user's Home folder ("~/whatever") or relative to the boot volume ("/whatever").


If moving your Home folder really is simple, I might try it next time I wipe my disk. Then again, that will probably be when Leopard comes out, and then I won't want to try anything that hasn't been proven to work with Leopard...