Disk space

[laddiebuck]

Hi,

I would like to install PC-BSD on a low-end laptop. I was a bit thrown by the required disk space -- something like 4-8GB? I have only a small harddrive, and two Linux distros already on it. What I typically do is install the OSes on small partitions, and have one large partition that is shared among them, for large binaries or data. My question is how little disk space I could squeak by with? Do I really need 4G of space? Ideally I would like to be able to install PC-BSD in 1-2GB, tops. Is this possible, whilst not gutting the system?
Stuff like /tmp and /home of course would be on a separate partition.

Thanks,
laddiebuck

[TerryP]

A minimal install of PC-BSD 1.x usually consomes about 3~5gb last I checked, as point in fact. My test machine had about an 8.4gb disk drive that was half full running PC-BSD 1.0RC1 w/o adding files.


PC-BSD7 will probably be the same or larger :\. If the low end hardware is important and small disk drives, you should try one of the regular BSDS (Free,Net, or Open), something like DSL might be of interest to you.



It's important to note though, for an upgrade between versions, e.g. 1.5->1.5.1, enough disk space on / is typically required. This can be from a few tens of megs to a couple of gigs [b]free space[b], and can be quit damaging to stability if a large upgrade fails to upgrade proper because of it.


FreeBSDs file system also keeps a reserve of 8% free space for performance reasons (among other ones), and will degrade if there is less then 15% free space.



I'd say that you could cram FreeBSD or OpenBSD into a 2GB disk drive easy enough, it's just a Q of how much you'd want. If I had that kind of disk space, I'd do a custom install of FreeBSD... Which allows one to strip things down a bit more.

[laddiebuck]

Right, thanks. I would prefer PC-BSD to plain FreeBSD because it is meant to be a desktop BSD, with all the typical desktop goodies. But I am no stranger to having a desktop without those: in fact, most of my desktops are just fluxboxes or openboxes, with sometimes an automount daemon.

I was just surprised because the OS comes on one CD -- so how could it fill up quite that much space? But if you say it will need it and cannot be stripped down, I suppose I will just stick NetBSD on the machine. But it would be nice to have a desktop that took care of, say, ACPI stuff like the fan, decently.

[TerryP]

I believe PC-BSD7 will need 2 CD's and there is quite a bit of compression involved with the CDs contents.



Size wise, if you've got manual pages and the systems GCC, /usr alone (if I recall correctly) will take up about 500-600mb of space without the contents of /usr/src, /usr/obj, /usr/local, or /usr/ports. The ports tree is like 250~400mbo of files last I checked, plus the distfiles and temporary files during a build of a port. /usr/src is probably the same size and /usr/obj is empty unless you compile stuff in /usr/src.


Then combine the size of X.Org 7.2 and dependencies (which includes many dependencies) adds more disk space but I don't know how much. Then combine KDE3 + Deps + add ins from PC-BSD, it gets fat.



When I setup FreeBSD 7.0-Release with the X from the CD-ROM, I fetched all of the packages I needed ahead of time, for my 'custom' desktop (which is thiner then PC-BSD). I bloated my / file system before I moved the stuff to /usr. There was over 800mb of BZip2 compressed Tar acrhives from downloading all of the FreeBSD packages. And I dont' use KDE or Gnome on that box, only "as much of" them as I need for apps I want (e.g. gdm, amarok, kontact, koffice, abiword, gnumeric, etc). My entire install: FreeBSD 7-Stable, Ports Tree, Source Tree, all my software, and /home is about 12~15GB of data (note that my home directory roughly 3.5~4.5gb)

[laddiebuck]

OK, thanks. I typically use Debian, and am used to about 0.5G for /, with /tmp and /var, /usr and /opt, and /home on separate partitions. But I don't use many X packages: fluxbox, firefox and xterm are practically the only graphical packages I use; everything else I run in screen (vi, mutt, mocp, ncdu, irssi, antiword and bashburn are the only ones I use regularly).

I'll just go with a custom FreeBSD, I think. Thanks for your help.

[TerryP]

have fun