Out of the frying pan...

[Andrew L. Gould]

On Thursday 13 January 2005 04:18 pm, John wrote:
> 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...

I don't think you'll ever regret getting more space.  Even if the 
platform doesn't need the space, you never know what immediate needs 
might pop up.

The first wedding/family reunion we attended with a digital camera 
produced almost 400MB of our own 5 Megapixal images.  That doesn't 
include copies of the relative's images.  Being over a thousand miles 
from home is no time to upgrade a laptop. (A slide show of the photos 
was running during the last extended family dinner.)

>
> > 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?

I suggest downloading and installing the 5.3 Release CD #1; and cvsup it 
from there.  It would give you a clean start.  There were a lot of 
changes from 5.2.1 to 5.3.

A larger hard drive would uncomplicate this issue.

>
> > 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.

That may be true for /usr/src; but are you also using that system 
for /usr/ports?  How is /tmp being handled?

>
> > 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.

It's hard to help with this issue.  Try using 'du' (man du) to find 
directories that are using unexpected amounts of space.

Good luck,

Andrew Gould