Hi,

I have a spare 20GB hardrive that I want to use to install OpenBSD to practice with.
I dont want to install added packages and the GUI, I dont want that. At least for now.

So, as you can see, 20GB is not a whole lot.

Please just tell me the minimum disk space requirements for OpenBSD. How low can one go with disk space when installing OpenBSD WITHOUT the GUI and all that extra stuff?

Thanks for the help.

The project's official FAQ addresses this very question in Section 4.7 entitled "How much space do I need for an OpenBSD installation?":

http://openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning
It all depends upon what you are doing.

Let me ease your mind for a moment. I run OpenBSD on an Asus Eee PC which only has a 4GB SSD drive. Granted, I have added an 8GB SD card which is used for /home (of which I may use only ~2GB...), but otherwise with a few concessions, I can live fine with this arrangement (As an example, I move /tmp to RAM...). When I do need to build packages, I attach a USB drive which contains /usr/src (2GB), /usr/obj (2GB), /usr/ports (40GB), /usr/xenocara (2GB), & /usr/obj (2GB), but this is because I run -current, & I rebuild the system weekly. If I were to run -release, I probably could live with just the 4GB + 8GB drive arrangement. And yes, I run X with Fluxbox or CWM as window managers. If I was really wanting to be hardcore, I could probably live with only 4GB, but I don't see any reason to live in such an austere configuration. As it is, I have built OpenOffice, Java, & a number of other applications. It's handy having so much in such a small netbook.
Personally, 20GB of hard disk space is really quite a lot -- even if you were to be running GNOME or KDE, but you won't be able to download every MP3 file on Earth. Storing movies is probably out of the picture too, but if your needs are modest, 20GB can be a lot of space.

The secret of figuring out how to live in such a small drive is to experiment. You probably won't get it right the first time, but after a while (if you keep at it...), you will learn from what you have done before. Past mistakes can prove to be a wonderful teacher.

Again, it all depends upon what you are doing.

Like Ocicat said it depends on what you are doing. My basic BSD installs (w/o dev or GUI's and excluding logs) amount to: NetBSD: < 500 MB, OpenBSD = 1 GB, FreeBSD < 1.5 GB.


I agree but that's something I think only people will appreciate who had disks when sizes were still measured in megabytes...

20GB is plenty of space to actually have it run. OpenBSD is often configured on read-only external flash drives of one gig for use in routers.

The real question is what do you want to do.

I used to run OpenBSD from a 4GiB USB Drive, with X (pekwm as window manager) and OpenOffice, so, as you can guess, 20GiB is more than plenty.

You'll probably end up using more space in /home than the actual OS will.