# How much hdd-space does FreeBSD need?



## Radek (Oct 24, 2010)

Hi everybody,

I'm not sure if I'm right but I think that FreeBSD requires much more space on the disk then Linux. 
I'm considering to try to use FreeBSD on my laptop but I have a 64 GB SS-HDD there so I'm not sure if it does make any sense.

So my question is: how much space would need PC-BSD with KDE, OpenOffice, Eclipse ... so I mean just normal desktop environment?

Regards,
Radek


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## da1 (Oct 24, 2010)

It depends on how you install the application (pkgs or ports), if you keep the ports tree on disk or not and other things but I would say a max of 10G's.

Personally, I have a 8.1 amd64 + kde/OO/opera/other stuff on a T400 with the ports/distfiles on disk and it takes 8G's. On the other hand, I am dualbooting Fedora 13 x64 with the same stuff in it but only uses ~6G's. The reason is because I used the ports tree for all applications. I'm sure that if I would use the pkg's, the occupied diskspace would be smaller.


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## Radek (Oct 24, 2010)

Thanks for your answer.
I think I will try first with an other HDD to check if my whole hardware is supported and all Apps are working


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## phoenix (Oct 24, 2010)

Radek said:
			
		

> I'm not sure if I'm right but I think that FreeBSD requires much more space on the disk then Linux.  I'm considering to try to use FreeBSD on my laptop but I have a 64 GB SS-HDD there so I'm not sure if it does make any sense.



FreeBSD itself (just the OS, no ports tree, no source tree, no Xorg, no gui apps, etc) installs into less than 2 GB of disk (closer to 1 GB).  It's the apps you install on top that take up all the disk space, and the source/object tree for compiling the OS, and the ports tree for installing/compiling apps.

You can minimise disk churn and extend the life of the SSD by sticking to binary packages (pkg_add()) and binary OS update (freebsd-update()).



> So my question is: how much space would need PC-BSD with KDE, OpenOffice, Eclipse ... so I mean just normal desktop environment?



Well, which is it?  Do you want to know about FreeBSD or PC-BSD?  The default installs are *very* different.  One installs just the base FreeBSD OS, the other installs FreeBSD + Xorg + KDE + a bunch of other stuff.  One installs in 1-2 GB, the other into about 10 GB.


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## vermaden (Oct 24, 2010)

Radek said:
			
		

> Hi everybody,
> 
> I'm not sure if I'm right but I think that FreeBSD requires much more space on the disk then Linux.
> I'm considering to try to use FreeBSD on my laptop but I have a 64 GB SS-HDD there so I'm not sure if it does make any sense.
> ...



The FreeBSD itself requires about 230 MB for *base system* + *man pages* + *kernel* (without debug symbols), all other stuff depends on its size, XFCE will take less space then KDE, but more the Openbox.

If You came from Linux world, then these 'thinkgs' (KDE/XFCE/OpenOffice.org/Eclipse) will take the same amount of space as in Linux.


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## shitson (Oct 24, 2010)

Have a look at the handbook article. No operating system I know of will use all 64GB of your SSD for an install. The largest I've heard about is Windows Vista/7 with 15GB installs but still that's only a fraction of your total disk size.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Oct 25, 2010)

Radek said:
			
		

> I'm considering to try to use FreeBSD on my laptop but I have a 64 GB SS-HDD there so I'm not sure if it does make any sense.
> 
> So my question is: how much space would need PC-BSD with KDE, OpenOffice, Eclipse ... so I mean just normal desktop environment?


I'm running FreeBSD on a busy server (web for 10 or so domains, plus lots of email) on a box with mirrored 32GB drives:

```
(0:6) gate:~> df -h
Filesystem            Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/mirror/gm0s1a    496M    367M     89M    80%    /
/dev/mirror/gm0s1d     15G     12G    1.9G    87%    /var
/dev/mirror/gm0s1e    3.9G    8.0K    3.6G     0%    /var/crash
/dev/mirror/gm0s1f    3.9G    3.2G    385M    89%    /usr
/dev/mirror/gm0s1g    3.9G     20K    3.6G     0%    /tmp
/dev/mirror/gm0s1h    3.3G    1.1G    1.9G    37%    /sysprog
```

That's a full install (saying "install everything" in the setup menu) with 670 ports currently installed.

Any disk usage difference between FreeBSD and Linux with identical applications installed is going to be from choices taken during the installation process - installing system / utility / etc. sources, installing the ports collection, etc.

FreeBSD and Linux on the same architecture (i386, for example) are going to take about the same amount of space for applications and data, since they're compiled with similar versions of the same compiler (gcc).

As a simple example:

```
(0:9) gate:/tmp# ls -l /usr/local/bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  672336 Jun  5 07:40 /usr/local/bin/bash*
(0:10) gate:/tmp# file /usr/local/bin/bash/usr/local/bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), for FreeBSD 6.4 
(604100), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), FreeBSD-style, stripped
(0:11) gate:/tmp# ls -l /usr/compat/linux/bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  680824 Oct  1  2009 /usr/compat/linux/bin/bash*
(0:12) gate:/tmp# file /usr/compat/linux/bin/bash
/usr/compat/linux/bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (GNU/Linux), for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, dynamically linked (uses shared 
libs), stripped
```


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## fronclynne (Oct 25, 2010)

Without swap, 6G is probably enough, but you have to keep a close eye on stuff.


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## Radek (Oct 25, 2010)

Ok, so I should clarify what I meant.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems for me that every installed application, like for example Firefox, creates own copy of the root within the Programs directory and duplicates lot of files that already exist in the system. So I thought sooner or later the amount of used disk space will grown much faster than under Linux.

Or am I wrong? 

Please be polite with me guys, I just trying to consider if this is good idea to use FreeBSD or either PC-BSD as the main operating system.

Until now there are some "pros", I found that this system is incredible fast and powerful, and "contras", I cannot get some hardware to work (built-in webcam,USB-Headset, special keys like the volume control, touchpad).

Thanks for the input


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## fronclynne (Oct 25, 2010)

Radek said:
			
		

> Ok, so I should clarify what I meant.
> Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems for me that every installed application, like for example Firefox, creates own copy of the root within the Programs directory and duplicates lot of files that already exist in the system. So I thought sooner or later the amount of used disk space will grown much faster than under Linux.
> 
> Or am I wrong?



I think you're talking about the difference between static- and dynamic-linking.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_build

A dynamically-linked build for firefox isn't going to be hugely different, size-wise on either FreeBSD or Linux.  (Well, maybe. The .deb for firefox 3.6 on i386 ubuntu is about 12M, and the .tbz for FreeBSD 8 i386 is about 18M, so there's that, but I don't know what the installed sizes are, so there's also that.)


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## SirDice (Oct 25, 2010)

Radek said:
			
		

> Ok, so I should clarify what I meant.
> Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems for me that every installed application, like for example Firefox, creates own copy of the root within the Programs directory and duplicates lot of files that already exist in the system. So I thought sooner or later the amount of used disk space will grown much faster than under Linux.


I'm a little confused about what you mean here. What Programs directory?

As for space requirements, some parts take up some space. But not everybody may use it. You can for instance build everything from source. This will obviously take up space (extracting sources, compiler outputs, etc). However if you install pre-build packages that space isn't needed. 


```
dice@williscorto:~>df -h
Filesystem            Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad4s2a           496M    131M    325M    29%    /
devfs                 1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ad4s2e           5.8G    167M    5.2G     3%    /tmp
/dev/ad4s2d           989M    122M    788M    13%    /var
/dev/ad4s2f           5.8G    2.0G    3.4G    37%    /usr
procfs                4.0K    4.0K      0B   100%    /proc
linprocfs             4.0K    4.0K      0B   100%    /usr/compat/linux/proc
/dev/ufs/cortohome     71G     19G     46G    29%    /usr/home
molly:/usr/ports      3.9G    478M    3.1G    13%    /usr/ports
molly:/usr/src        989M    521M    389M    57%    /usr/src
molly:/usr/obj        2.4G    1.6G    675M    70%    /usr/obj
molly:/storage        1.8T    1.5T    170G    90%    /storage
```

/usr/ contains gnome2-lite, XFCE and a few applications I use. As you can see I have split off /usr/home/, for obvious reasons. 

/usr/ports/ contains the ports tree. Nothing else. Distfiles, packages and work directories are stored somewhere else.

/usr/src/ and /usr/obj/ are needed when doing a source update of the base OS. If you use freebsd-update these aren't needed (some ports require the source tree to build though).


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## oliverh (Oct 25, 2010)

Radek said:
			
		

> Hi everybody,
> 
> I'm not sure if I'm right but I think that FreeBSD requires much more space on the disk then Linux.
> I'm considering to try to use FreeBSD on my laptop but I have a 64 GB SS-HDD there so I'm not sure if it does make any sense.
> ...



Just to give you some numbers: I'm using FreeBSD 8.1 on a Asus EEE 900a (Atom) with a 8G SSD together with Firefox, Fluxbox, Xorg, Mutt and some other applications and I have arround 4G left.


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## phoenix (Oct 25, 2010)

In theory, using PBIs on PC-BSD for large apps like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, KDE, etc will "waste" disk space by duplicating libraries that could be shared.  However, you gain a lot of convenience for that "wasted" disk space.  And the actual amount of disk space "wasted" isn't all that noticable.  We're talking a few 100s of MB, not 10s of GB.

For someone just starting out with FreeBSD, it's probably best to go with PC-BSD.  The installer is easier to use, the GUI and desktop environment are pre-configured, a bunch of useful apps are pre-installed, and you can install other apps via a nice, easy, point-n-click interface.

Once you get used to PC-BSD, then you can try a re-install with FreeBSD and do it all manually.


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## Radek (Oct 26, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> to PC-BSD, then you can try a re-install with FreeBSD and do it all manually.



Great Idea 

At the moment I have installed PC-BSD on my second HDD and trying to get everything to work. I found the solution for the touchpad scrolling issue already. But I cannot get my built-in webcam. It's being recognized and the device appears as /dev/video0 but skype don't see it and VLC cannot access it.

Also the USB Headset doesn't work. Similar issue as with the webcam, the device is in the system but in mixer is not there.

I tried to use suspend and hibernate once but I cannot wake-up after. But I didn't look at it closer so maybe it's something simple. 

But I keep searching for solution 

I like the way a lot of things in FreeBSD are working, especially that a lot of things are easy to configure manually. Linux is trying to configure lots of things automatically and if it doesn't work (and this happens very often) you have no chance to fix it.


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## mirco (Jun 2, 2015)

phoenix said:


> You can minimise disk churn and extend the life of the SSD by sticking to [...]
> binary OS update (freebsd-update()).


I wonder what would be another way than _binary_ OS update (freebsd-update())?


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## wblock@ (Jun 2, 2015)

You're responding to a thread that is five years old.  Still...



mirco said:


> I wonder what would be another way than _binary_ OS update



The other method is by building from source: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html.


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## mirco (Jun 9, 2015)

wblock@ said:


> You're responding to a thread that is five years old.  Still...


Time is relative, ignorance remains.



wblock@ said:


> The other method is by building from source:
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html.


I thought I would be that. Thanks for your patience with noob-questions.


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## freethread (Jun 9, 2015)

mirco said:


> Time is relative, ignorance remains.



Ignorance has a cure, stupidity cannot be cured.


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## rufwoof (Jun 24, 2017)

I allocated 15GB to a partition that I installed FreeBSD destkop to (xfce, LibreOffice, Firefox ...etc). When installed that partition was split 14GB to ufs and around 700MB to swap as part of the install process. When I df -h that now it shows the main ufs partition using 8.8GB (3.7GB available) after some extensive use (updates etc.).

Seems to me that a 15GB partition allocation was a reasonable (purely by luck) choice of sizing.

Just to add, I've used only pkg install (other than for the kernel sources that I downloaded in order to install nvidia driver).


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## TheRaven (Dec 3, 2017)

I had installed FBSD 10 to a 75GB HDD giving it everything and when finished configuring, installing and rebuilding everything used 32GB which is awesome compared to a similar final installation of Windows using way over 100GB. I had a full desktop environment with about 5 different IDES all developer libs and a full blown multimedia experience with compositing, productivity software --had it all. System ran like a bat out of h3ll too.

~it was all installed in a Via Artigo with 2 GB of ram and a single core 32bit 1.5GHz chip using the Chrome 9 AGP chip with 500MB of shared video memory; the HDDs were WD velociraptors (10K RPM) 75 & 150 GB each --it was awesome. Forgot to mention (prior) that my media library (reading, audio and quite a few vids) was also local. I had an app for everything. Can't wait to get the ball rolling with 11.1 on all my DDR4 stuff now --time for an upgrade.

If you triple the recommended partition sizes for a default FBSD installation you're good to go golden and still won't require much HDD realestate; it's your home folder structure (userland dir) that you want to save for last and let it have the remainder of the space.


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