canned distribution's i86 disk space requirements?

[Nikolas Britton]

On 1/13/06, Kael Fischer <kael.fischer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all:
>
> I am curious as to the disk space requirements of the various "canned
> distribution sets" on i86 hardware.
>
> While the following excerpt from the Handbook
> (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-pre.html)
> was accurate back in the day (I've been using FreeBSD since 2.2.X), it
> doesn't seem to have much relationship to the "Minimal" canned
> distributions in 6.0-Release.  It certainly seems that X has grown
> larger than the 100 MB suggested.
>
> > A minimal installation of FreeBSD takes as little as 100 MB of disk
> > space. However, that is a very minimal install, leaving almost no
> > space for your own files. A more realistic minimum is 250 MB without
> > a graphical environment, and 350 MB or more if you want a graphical
> > user interface. If you intend to install a lot of third party software as
> > well, then you will need more space.
>
> Does anyone know how much space Minimal, User and X-User take to
> install?  This would be excellent information to have available for
> the user and sysinstall itself.
>
> What would be almost too much to hope for, would be some error
> checking where the diskspace requirements of the selected packages are
> compared to the requested partitioning scheme before the commit.  It
> was a dream I had once...  The current failure mode is inelegant.
>
> [this is not a flame about sysinstall...  i find it easy to use, most
> of the time, and it has improved over the years.]
>
> If someone knows the answer, let's get it into the handbook.  Or
> perhaps someone has hooks for sysinstall/dist.h and dist.c that can
> pull out the tar file names (e.g. base.am,...) for various sets?  I
> imagine that a basic understanding of the install process would be all
> that is really needed to figure out what files are used for what sets.
>

The attached report I made should answer all of your questions.

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