minimum requirements

[backyard]

--- free bsd <root4freebsd at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Thank you everyone for responding to my initial
> question.  
>    
>   In hindsight I realize I worded my original
> inquiry inaccurately.  What I am attempting to
> determine is how well or if ver 6.1 will work on a
> 4GB hard drive with a Pentium 4 - 3.06GHz cpu and
> 1GB ram?  The machine has a 232GB hard drive but I
> have another 4GB drive sitting around being unused
> that I was thinking of adding to the machine to
> configure in a dual boot setup with the 4GB drive
> being totally allocated to FreeBSD.  
>    
>   However, before attempting that task I am trying
> to determine whether or not it would be even
> feasible to use a 4GB drive to install v 6.1 or
> should I use a larger drive to install the many of
> FreeBSD's features?  And if a larger drive how large
> of a drive would I need to utilize many or any of
> its features without limiting myself to a bare bones
> setup?  Additionally, if the 4GB drive will work how
> limited would the install/capabilities/features be? 
> 
>    
>   I am not at all opposed to using a larger drive
> but at the present time do not have a clue as to
> what size drive I should use for the most
> flexibility regarding type of installation options.
>    
>   -art
> 
>  		


4gb would get you a basic setup system with X. As long
as you use packages for your installation. Building
ports from source will likely run you out of space
during port builds especially for the larger ports. 

you should be able to get the system, X, KDE OR Gnome,
running and a few other ports here and there. You
would be better off installing something like Icewm or
XFCE as these would get you nice looking window
managers without all the bloat and would be able to
run the apps from the bigger desktops. once the
dependant libraries are installed.

the issue you may run into is in swap. With 1 gig or
RAM you will only need a small amount of swap, maybe
as little as 64Meg. This would only be an issue if you
plan on getting core dumps from the kernel, because
you will not have space. This is why typically it is
recommended to have swap equal to Ram plus 1 meg. And
this is for a single partition of swap. the core won't
split over two swaps.

All in all more hard drive space is probably a good
idea just for /usr and or /home space depending on
what your doing. It would be a must if you want to
build things from source. 

These base system itself will be about 500 megs, ports
will add on 300 megs or so, then its the ports you
choose. 4 gig would work ok, but would get frustrating
quick. I would go with at least 8 gig for a "loaded"
system which for me is about 4.5 gigs total and like
300 packages installed mostly science packages and the
dependancies of gnome2. If you want to build things I
run with 10-15g slices for more space. and outside of
building that is more then I generally need. Although
for fairness I usually have multi-boot modes and share
a data drive amongst the OSs.

a list of the ports you want to use would help
determine space because some use a ton, and some use
very little.

-brian