Aragorn wrote:

> Thus, I turn to you, the longstanding Gentoo gurus <cough> (), with a
> couple of questions...:
>
> (1) How much diskspace would I need to allocate for...

This is alwyas a bit tricky to answer, as much depends on what you will be
installing.



> - /usr
3-4G should be enough, but if you would bloat with Gnome2, I think you need to
add a gig or two more.

> - /usr/src
A normal kernel source + compiled objects and kernel will take around
290-400M, just multiply with the number of kernels you will be keeping.
Myself I have set the portage build directory to resident inside /usr/src too,
mine is a bit bloated in size, 5G, but some packages like OpenOffice needs
quite a lot of space to be built.

> - /usr/portage
Today portage is 3.7G, but that will grow with the number of new packages that
will be included in future and shrink depending on which packages are dropped.

> - /usr/local
1M, really I have 164K worth of files in this directory and it's on an
installation that is soon 4 years old.

> - /srv
0M

> - /opt
This depends much on what pre-compiled packages you emerge, I have a number of
different JDKs installed, Acrobat, nero, staroffice, realplayer, skype and it
uses 1.2G.

For me the main difference on the server and the desktops are X11, and some
3rd party pre-compiled files, I may not need all of the files, but sometimes I
need to do some work remotely and then it's easy to have all my needed tools
on the server and at the same time it's good to have a lot of the server stuff
on the desktops, so you can experiment in a test environment before using it
on the server.


> (2) As of 2.6.23, the Linux kernel includes Xen support, but is
> this only for unprivileged guests or for privileged guests as
> well? In other words, will I still need to patch the kernel
> tree?

Can't say I can find Xen in the kernel source, KVM has been included for a
while. There is a Xen patched kernel included in Gentoo, but that is version
2.6.20, while those pre-compiled ones at Xen Community are built on 2.6.18.
Looking at kernel.org, I can't see anything mentioning that Xen would have
been merged.


--

//Aho