Size of FreeBSD

[John Pettitt]

Mark Goodell wrote:

>Could you please tell me how big FreeBSD is, in terms
>of both (1) the bare minimum needed to run
>applications and (2) the typical installation.  How
>many 1.44MB diskettes, for example.  
>
>The point of my interest has to do with an old concern
>about how the OS's (Microsoft's especially) have
>become gargantuan in size.  
>
>Thank you!
>
>Mark Goodell, Richmond, VA.
>
>  
>
Part of the answer to your question relates to the definition of
"operating system"  FreeBSD will boot from 2 floppies - thats how the
install works and if you were building an embedded  system without all
the normal utilities and user interface you could do so from a flash
card with ease.  If you want a "real" computer - with compilers, tools
UI and the like then you'll need a bigger box.   Some real world examples:

m0n0wall runs a bare bones FreeBSD from an 8MB flash card but suggests
64MB of RAM..

I have an old PIII/200 with a 4G disk and 64MB memory running FreeBSD
that runs my solar power system - it's total overkill the cpuload runs
about 2%.  However to compile some of the tools I wanted to use 64MB was
too small - the compiler was paging it it took forever.   If I wanted to
just run the solar power application I could probably run the whole
thing on a 486 class machine with 32mb ram and boot from a 32mb flash
card (but why buy a new box when you've got a 'free' old one?)

My home server / router / stratum one time server / firewall / fax
server / and every thing else server runs on a $350 eMachines box with a
2.9GHz Celeron and 512MB memory (oh and 2TB of disks :)

It comes down to what do you want to do, what application do you want to
run.   As they say - YMMV.

John