Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:38:31 -0800 From: John Pettitt <jpp@cloudview.com> To: Mark Goodell <goodell70@yahoo.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Size of FreeBSD Message-ID: <422E0D47.4050800@cloudview.com> In-Reply-To: <20050308190411.69669.qmail@web52905.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20050308190411.69669.qmail@web52905.mail.yahoo.com>
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Mark Goodell wrote: >Could you please tell me how big FreeBSD is, in terms >of both (1) the bare minimum needed to run >applications and (2) the typical installation. How >many 1.44MB diskettes, for example. > >The point of my interest has to do with an old concern >about how the OS's (Microsoft's especially) have >become gargantuan in size. > >Thank you! > >Mark Goodell, Richmond, VA. > > > Part of the answer to your question relates to the definition of "operating system" FreeBSD will boot from 2 floppies - thats how the install works and if you were building an embedded system without all the normal utilities and user interface you could do so from a flash card with ease. If you want a "real" computer - with compilers, tools UI and the like then you'll need a bigger box. Some real world examples: m0n0wall runs a bare bones FreeBSD from an 8MB flash card but suggests 64MB of RAM.. I have an old PIII/200 with a 4G disk and 64MB memory running FreeBSD that runs my solar power system - it's total overkill the cpuload runs about 2%. However to compile some of the tools I wanted to use 64MB was too small - the compiler was paging it it took forever. If I wanted to just run the solar power application I could probably run the whole thing on a 486 class machine with 32mb ram and boot from a 32mb flash card (but why buy a new box when you've got a 'free' old one?) My home server / router / stratum one time server / firewall / fax server / and every thing else server runs on a $350 eMachines box with a 2.9GHz Celeron and 512MB memory (oh and 2TB of disks :) It comes down to what do you want to do, what application do you want to run. As they say - YMMV. John
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