/ almost out of space just after installation

[Olivier Nicole]

Hi,

> Q1: Is 26M free space on / after installing FreeBSD normal?

That is not the right question to ask :) The question would be "is it
normal that / is using 430M?". It depemds what you have in / file
system. After instal, I have 271M used, but for example, my user home
directory is on a separate file system.

> Q2: Will I be able to install GNOME, Firefox, 

Yes, the installed software goes to /usr

> download 30 MB of
> files, and place them on my GNOME dekstop?  (I believe the desktop
> is located at /home/cstankevitz/.desktop aka on the root partition
> where there is only 26M of free space)

No because you have your home directory in the root file system and
there is only 36 MB left, so you cannot use 30MB.

> Q3: Which changes, if any, should I make to my system?

Reinstall with sensible partitioning; for a desktop machine I'd use:

/    2GB
/usr 20~30GB
/var 2GB
/tmp 1GB
/home the rest

On the servers I have, have a maximum of 10GB used on the busiest
machine, including a full buildworld/buildkernel.

Best regards,

Olivier