minimum requirements

[Jerry McAllister]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 10:00:11AM -0700, free bsd wrote:

> Thank you everyone for responding to my initial question.  
>    
>   In hindsight I realize I worded my original inquiry inaccurately.  What 
> I am attempting to determine is how well or if ver 6.1 will work on a 4GB 
> hard drive with a Pentium 4 - 3.06GHz cpu and 1GB ram?  The machine has 
> a 232GB hard drive but I have another 4GB drive sitting around being 
> unused that I was thinking of adding to the machine to configure in a 
> dual boot setup with the 4GB drive being totally allocated to FreeBSD.  
>    
>   However, before attempting that task I am trying to determine whether or 
> not it would be even feasible to use a 4GB drive to install v 6.1 or 
> should I use a larger drive to install the many of FreeBSD's features?  
> And if a larger drive how large of a drive would I need to utilize many 
> or any of its features without limiting myself to a bare bones setup?  
> Additionally, if the 4GB drive will work how limited would the 
> install/capabilities/features be?  
>    
>   I am not at all opposed to using a larger drive but at the present time 
> do not have a clue as to what size drive I should use for the most 
> flexibility regarding type of installation options.

I think you probably have your answer from other responses - that it depends
on what you want to do with it.   If it is just to have a FreeBSD running
to look it over, 4 GB is plenty of space.   You could put on FreeBSD
and Xwindows and use a very basic windows manager like AfterStep or some
other very lean ones.   You could probably even get Apache on it and
maybe a browser.   But those would have to install from packages and
not a build from ports.    You would have trouble getting OpenOffice
on it, but maybe from the prebuilt package that is available from
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6.0-release/editors/
  Grab the latest one.
But, you would not be able to build any of these with that little space.
Openoffice seems to take over 10 GB to do its build, for example.  Also,
you might get something like MySQL running, but would soon run out of
space for the database.

You could easily build the basic system, then put a big file system on
another disk and move some of the stuff that can grow big over there 
such as /usr/local, /usr/ports, /var/spool, /var/db, /var/log and make
symlinks to them as you need.   Also, you can put your web site over
in the big disk, just by changing a line in httpd.conf.

If you build on the small disk, I would still suggest making root
its own partition, as well as a reasonable sized separate /tmp and, 
of course, some swap space.  Although if you are just experimenting,
you could just make a swap and /tmp and leave everything else in root
it is better to keep root small in a real production system - in case
a recovery is needed.

////jerry

>    
>   -art
> 
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