Re: Minimum HD space
On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 04:04:11PM -0600, Dave Price wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 08:31:12AM -0700, Jay wrote:
> > I'm about to get my own copy of debian potato and so far I wish to install
> > it on my laptop along with Win98, so I want to know what is the bare min. HD
> > space required to do an install; so far I have freed<sp> up 600 Mb, is that
> > enough? This is so I can learn about debian and Linux for now. I shall
> > eventually nuke win98 once I'm convinced.
>
> 600mb is plenty for a minimal system - if you are going to use gnome or
> kde, it will get a bit tight tho.
>
> aloha,
> dave
But just for comparison I have a pretty much droppable-in kit of woody
that's 150 MB - meaning, I like to put it in 200 MB "shaved off the end"
partitions - which is not GUI on its own, but enough to run a laptop
comfortably otherwise.
Install one of the curses front ends for apt (such as aptitude) and it
will tell you how much space a package will use when it installs.
make sure you have some room in var since .deb's get fetched to
/var/cache/apt/archives during install or upgrade phases. I just
mention this because since you're running on tight space you may want to
shave var a bit - you don't need months worth of logs, right? You
certainly can, but do leave room for a couple of chubby packages,
and note that you may have to pick packages to install two to five at a
time like fruits and berries rather than take the "easy route" and type
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade.
Anyways if you have a pressed CD of potato, my advice would be to go
ahead and install Base, skip the dselect / package selection phase on
reboot, answer the basic questions, and get enough so your network is
going.
Then tweak your /etc/apt/sources.list file so it points at "woody"
instead of the word "potato" or "stable". I say "woody" because we are
close to freeze, and when it really does freeze, some other name will be
assigned to testing, but you'll probably want to stick with the fresh
release for at least a little while.
Anyways, then do
apt-get update
and watch it chug to get the new listings
apt-get dist-upgrade
dist-upgrade tries to be a little more careful than just upgrade.
Answer questions as they come in.
then settle yourself into the new setup with
apt-get upgrade
maybe a few more things will put themselves in, but probably not;
you're still pretty small here.
apt-get install dialog debconf aptitude vim
(well, okay, if there's another text editor you like better, get that,
but for goodness sake's don't stick with ae. Ugh.) The point here is
that debconf can use dialog as its interface if you have it around -
which until this point you didn't; the Base only has a wimpy version of
debconf called debconf-tiny; and aptitude is a full screen
dselect/packages by apt interface. It'll be muuuuch easier to start
picking your packages if you can see their descriptions and things, and
this way you don't have to be telepathic about their names.
make sure aptitude options are NOT set to "pick Suggests" as well as
"pick Recommends" - the interconnects of unnecessary but cool packages
might overflow you, or at least waste space best used elsewhere.
BTW Tasks are a great way to start. but you might want to tag a tag,
then pop open its listing and see what it picked, so that you can
unselect the task itself, and un-pick some of them. Depends on the
task. But for instance "task-laptop" includes toshiba utilities, and if
you're not a toshiba, they're a waste.
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
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