Out of the frying pan...

[John]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 04:08:53PM -0600, Andrew L. Gould wrote:
> On Thursday 13 January 2005 03:24 pm, John wrote:
> > I just keep painting myself into corners, and I'm hoping that people
> > can point out some (presumably dumb) things that I am doing, and
> > recommend a course of action that will get me back to where I want
> > to be.

[ deleted for brevity ]

> > I see my options as this:
> > 1) Try to figure out the dependency trees for kde, install kde-lite
> >    instead, and rip out the packages I don't need (theoretically
> >    possible - but feasible?)
> > 2) Back up /home, reinstall a minimum 5.2.1 system, do the
> > installworld and installkernel again, and then do the install of the
> > kde (or kde-lite) then restore /home (but how much larger do I need
> > to make / and /usr?)
> > 3) Buy or build a 5.3 installation set, and redo the installation,
> >    using only the distributions I need, and hope it fits.
> >
> > Other suggestions?  Anything obvious I'm missing?  You folks have
> > been extrememly helpful so far, so I'm hoping there's a good solution
> > I'm just missing!
> 
> 1. Upgrade the hard drive.

Yeah - thinking about that - but should I really need SEVERAL Gb to
support the environment I want?  Maybe...

> 2. If you're going to install Windows, install it before you install 
> FreeBSD.

Yup - learned THAT the hard way!  We do need to update the handbook
and other documentation in this regard - the current docs give the
impression that the only problem is that the boot manager gets
lost.  I was, therefore, entirely ready for that, and had everything
at hand to put it back - only to discover after putting the boot
manager back that the problem was far, far worse than that.  Of
course, that may be due to the ancient Windows I was installing.

> 3. Definitely go with a clean installation of FreeBSD 5.3 rather than 
> 5.2.1.

Sigh.  OK.  I'll have to see if I can build that from what I have
already...  Pointers to a way to build a distribution set for
5.3-STABLE from what I have built?

> 4. Building OpenOffice requires massive resources.  Use the binary 
> packages.

Oh, definitely!  That is what I intend to do.

Since I am using OpenOffice, should I use kde-lite instead of the
full kde installation?

> 5. When you install from ports, make sure you "make install clean" to 
> remove working files when they're no longer needed.

OK, but that system, where I have the sources and all, is not hurting
for space.

> 6. Use portupgrade (in the ports) to upgrade applications; but exclude 
> OpenOffice.  Not only can portupgrade take care of dependencies, but it 
> has options to look for binary packages online before opting to compile 
> from source.

Ah hah!  This is a trick I didn't know.  I'll learn that.

Thanks!

> Best of luck,
> 
> Andrew Gould

Thank you, Andrew.  I'd still like to know why the disk footprint
for what I want seems to have grown to dramatically.  My hunch is
that when I did the "installworld" I got a bunch of "distributions"
(to use the install terminology) that I didn't intend, but that's
just speculation on my part.
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG