/ almost out of space just after installation

[Oliver Fromme]

Chris Stankevitz <chrisstankevitz at yahoo.com> wrote:
 > I just installed FreeBSD. After I installed it, I was surprised to
 > find only 26M of space on /. I used the auto-defaults during the
 > Disklabel portion of the install.
 > 
 > [cstankevitz at crs-m6300 ~]$ df -h
 > Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
 > /dev/ad4s1a    496M    430M     26M    94%    /
 > devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
 > /dev/ad4s1e    496M     14K    456M     0%    /tmp
 > /dev/ad4s1f    113G    1.9G    102G     2%    /usr
 > /dev/ad4s1d    2.9G    7.9M    2.6G     0%    /var
 > 
 > Q1: Is 26M free space on / after installing FreeBSD normal?

It depends on the FreeBSD version, and whether you installed
the kernel with debug symbols.  430 MB space used in the
root file system isn't completely uncommon.

Nowadays I recomment to spend 1 GB for the root file system,
especially if you plan to keep more than one kernel.

 > Q2: Will I be able to install GNOME, Firefox, download 30 MB of
 > files, and place them on my GNOME dekstop?  (I believe the desktop is
 > located at /home/cstankevitz/.desktop aka on the root partition where
 > there is only 26M of free space)

All third-party software goes to /usr, so there's no problem.

 > Q3: Which changes, if any, should I make to my system?

Make sure that /home is a symlink to /usr/home.
You already have /var and /tmp on separate partitions,
which is good.

Personally I would grow the root file system to 1 GB.
It's not strictly necessary, but it's better to have
some more space there, especially during system updates,
e.g. when updating the kernel you want to keep a copy
of the old kernel.

By the way, I often don't create /tmp as a disk partition,
but as a memory disk.  This is unrelated to the size of
the root file system, though.  An entry like this in
/etc/fstab will do it:

md   /tmp   mfs   rw,nosuid,-s500m,async   0   0

Afterwards you can use the disk partition previously used
for /tmp for a different purpose (e.g. for swap, or add
it do the preceding partition which would be /var in your
case, I think.)

Best regards
   Oliver

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