Report on installation disk space requirements for FreeBSD

[Nikolas Britton]

MIME type was messed up the first time around.... Gmail butchers
formatted text so attached is the report.

The first thing of note this that the FreeBSD handbook states that the
ports system is 440MB:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-choosing.html
"The installation program does not check to see if you have adequate
space. Select this option only if you have adequate hard disk space.
As of FreeBSD 6.0, the FreeBSD Ports Collection takes up about 440 MB
of disk space. You can safely assume a larger value for more recent
versions of FreeBSD."

It's not. The ports system from the FreeBSD 6-RELEASE CD is 280MB to
install. I just updated my ports src yesterday, it's at 313MB now.
Maybe someone forgot to clean up work files or subtract
/usr/ports/distfiles from their calculation.

The 2nd thing of note from the report is why Linux compat takes up
255MB of real disk space but only 127MB on FreeBSD? I did the install
two time because I thought it was an error but it's not. Does FreeBSD
extract the tarballs to disk before it installs them? If so this may
explain why and it would also mean that only the first set of numbers
are valid for minimum disk space requirements.

--
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Report on installation disk space requirements for FreeBSD 6-RELEASE:

Test Rig:
VMware 5 (Win2K/NTFS), VM Settings:
32MB RAM
64MB RAM For KDE-Lite Install (failed with 32MB)
128MB RAM For GNOME-Lite Install (failed with 64MB)
4GB Hard Drive (Default settings)
CD-ROM (Pointing to FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE i386 ISO Images)
No USB, No Audio, No LAN

FreeBSD Disk Layout:
ad0s1a	4095MB	/	ufs2
ad0s1b	null	swap	null
ad0s1d	null	/var	null
ad0s1e	null	/tmp	null
ad0s1f	null	/usr	null

Everything (/tmp, /var, and /usr) is setup on the root partition, no swap partition was setup.

Results:
* 1st column of numbers are from the VM disk image file.
* 2nd column is from inside FreeBSD with "du -m".
* All numbers reported in megabytes.

Distribution Sets:
Developer		918	741
X-Developer		1080	882
Kern-Developer		526	427
X-Kern-Developer	690	568
User			393	319
X-User			560	461
Minimal			183	156

Miscellaneous Sets:
X-User (All X.Org)	572	476
X-User + GNOME-Lite	1247	1115
X-User + KDE-Lite	1438	1323
Minimal + Ports System	466	425
Minimal + Linux Compat.	438	282

Extrapolated Results:
Ports System		283	270
GNOME-Lite		688	655
KDE-Lite		879	864	
X.Org Default Install	164	143
X.Org Full Install	177	158
Linux Binary Compat.	255	127
Sys Sources + Proflibs	392	315
Kern Sources + Proflibs	133	109