[SOLVED] How much space for a full install plus a few extras.
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Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
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How much space for a full install plus a few extras.
I know this is a bit of an open-ended question but I am considering dual booting Debian and Slackware again (I have a long term plan to migrate to Slackware when I can wean myself off dependency-resolving package management). My Debian install is taking 27.6GB of the 60GB SSD I want to use for / -- that leaves, according to conky, 24.5GB free. Is a 20GB partition for / likely to be enough for a multilib install of Slackware plus about another 500MB of third-party software? My Debian install is quite bloated due to my having installed KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment and a good many other DEs and WMs as well as the XFCE I use so I can, if needed, shrink my Debian install but do I need to?
Location: Northeastern Michigan, where Carhartt is a Designer Label
Distribution: Slackware 32- & 64-bit Stable
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For the a full install of Slackware, including KDE, you'll need about 10G of your 20G disk partition.
But (there's always a but) that means that you'll be using the rest of that 20G for installing whatever optional software you need plus whatever you're going to be doing in your home directory so plan accordingly (or mount partitions from a separate drive maybe?).
On my systems I mount /home, /opt, /usr/local, pgsql, mysql and a couple of others from either local partitions on the drive or a second drive (the data bases, for example, are typically on separate drives). My laptop is partitioned locally, my desktop and servers are multiple drives, but all follow the same partitioning scheme. I do that so I can do a clean install of a Slackware release without needing to copy everything off to some external media (just copy /etc to somewhere). As you step thorough the installation, you declare your partitions but just don't format them -- works like a charm.
Couple of examples: OpenOffice4 is 589M installed, GoogleEarth is 195M. Still a lot of room, but, as we all know, things grow out of hand after a while.
But, yeah, 20G+ is enough room to do useful work (for a while, anyway).
Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,680
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Thanks, that gives some perspective, so how big is your Slackware /?
I know about using other partitions, by the way, I'll be using some other disk for /home/ so it's just the Slackware install that will be on the SSD (for now at least but that's another topic for another day).
I would want both Libre Office and Google Earth as well as a few Second Life clients that will probably take up around 100MB each -- so I suppose that ups my approximation from around 500MB of additional to around 1GB.
Is that still feasible, with "wiggle room" in 20GB?
Location: Northeastern Michigan, where Carhartt is a Designer Label
Distribution: Slackware 32- & 64-bit Stable
Posts: 3,541
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I'm not kidding -- a full install of Slackware is under 10G (that's everything).
LibreOffice is about the same size as OpenOffice, GoogleEarth is under 200M (and, if you've got a 64-bit box, you can install the 64-bit version of GoogleEarth, finally, yay). I don't know what Second Life is all about, so can't help you there.
Now, 20G is going to be tight -- you don't want to load stuff up and leave it there for eternity (like the source packages for LibreOffice, GoolgeEarth and whatever else), but you'd have some wiggle room. Just keep in mind that a couple of hundred meg here, a couple of hundred meg there and pretty soon you're talking about some real gig: you wouldn't want to run in a 20G partition for long, but to try it out, hey, that's plenty to prove the proposition -- then migrate to, you know, a "real" drive (most of mine are 250G and most of that 250G is empty space): You know, a gig is 1,000 meg, right?
That's one 250G disk (where the data bases are in flux and nowhere near the size they grow to over time). /var/lib/virtual has WinXP and Win7 installed for Patch Tuesday and maybe actual use once a quarter.
I don't use Multilib (everything is 64-bit), and I don't run any IDE's (but they aren't all the big either).
For a try-it-and-see system, yeah, 20G is enough to give you the idea (and it'll be bye-bye Debian fairly soon and you can just use the entire drive, eh?).
Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,680
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Thanks, I may just try it with 20GB though it sounds like I may need more? I know my Debian install ballooned once I started installing different DEs and the like though I'll likely stick with XFCE only for Slackware as I don't use any other DE.
I've plenty of HDD space lying around but, unfortunately, only 60GB of SSD:
Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,680
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Thank you. I'm beginning to think that the >25GB of Debian is just the kitchen-sink style of the package management. I am still very interested to hear of people with large installations and whether they're approaching 20GB.
Slackware's full install is about 7-8 GB in total, but if you add some 3rd party packages, such as LibreOffice, multilib, etc, you will need more than that. I guess 20 GB is more than enough
Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,680
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Thanks all. I reinstalled Debian the other day due to messing up my install so I've split the SSD in two and am dual-booting Slackware. Both distros currently fit easily within the ~25GB that gives them -- leading me to wonder what on earth I had installed under Debian to make it so huge.
I'll mark this as Solved and no doubt I'll be posting in the Slack forum once I get some time to look into compiling my own kernel and such.
With Debian any of the big DEs will pull in tons of dependencies - even if you turn off recommends it can still get quite bloated especially if you install via the meta packages. The 27.6GB you had in use originally does seem like a lot however.
Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,680
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Thanks, It seems enough at the moment, now I just have to install multilib and a few other things.
I've allowed more for my Debian install in the end (~20GB Slack, ~30GB Debian) but I don't foresee any space problems going by the posts here.
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