On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 19:48 -0500, DaVince wrote:
> Are you sure about this? A clean install of Xubuntu weighs in at less
> than 2GB, and I don't think the difference in sizes is THAT wide
> between Ubuntu and Xubuntu...
>
Here are some Fedora numbers for comparison:
My Fedora 8 system (full C/Java development, Wine, Apache, DNS,
PostgresQL, Postfix mail system, Open Office). /home holds all my code
sources, text+pics for 4 websites, a moderate audiovisual collection
plus a 2GB database) has 512 MB RAM and a 40 GB disk partitioned as
follows:
$ df -m
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 1938 367 1471 20% /
/dev/sda7 1938 353 1486 20% /var
/dev/sda3 14529 9766 4013 71% /home
/dev/sda2 14529 4863 8916 36% /usr
/dev/sda1 251 23 216 10% /boot/
tmpfs 251 0 251 0% /dev/shm
swap 2000
=====
15579 MB
My Fedora 10 laptop (full Java/C development, Open Office, collection of
audip and image files) has 1GFB RAM and a 160 GB disk partitioned as
follows:
$ df -m
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7 1970 411 1459 22% /
/dev/sda2 19686 4324 14363 24% /usr
/dev/sda8 84609 5092 75219 7% /home
/dev/sda5 1970 36 1835 2% /tmp
/dev/sda6 1970 486 1384 26% /var
/dev/sda1 494 163 305 35% /boot
tmpfs 501 2 500 1% /dev/shm
swap 2000
=====
10514 MB
The only downside found in a year's operation is that sda7 (/) and sda5
(/tmp) are too small to permit an automatic Fedora 10 -> 11 upgrade.
In general I use a lot of partitions in order to prevent any part of the
system suddenly chewing up all the disk, but IMO you can get away with
three partitions (/, swap and /home). Yes, it means a custom install but
I think its worth doing. The benefit is that you can keep everything
in /home through a complete clean reinstall if you don't reformat that
partition. After the reinstall you have to set up your private users and
groups exactly the same as they were before (i.e. the user and group IDs
*must* match those already on the contents of /home, but that's easy
enough - using "ls -l" before the users and groups have been set up
shows the uids and gids. In summary, then, for a current distro you need
to allow for the following data space:
System and programs 6 GB
Swap space 2 GB (I like twice RAM for swap space)
Personal data - at least 5 GB (as a separate partition)
IOW, if the disk is 40 GB or bigger, set the disk partition sizes up as:
System and programs 15 GB
Swap RAM * 2
Personal data everything else.
HTH
Martin
