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Date:      Sat, 31 Aug 2002 14:29:33 -0700
From:      "Corey Snow" <corey@snowpoint.com>
To:        Daniel Suh <daniel.suh@sympatico.ca>
Cc:        freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: minimum hd requirements
Message-ID:  <3D70D2CD.11432.39AC46C7@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <3D6D31E4.80903@sympatico.ca>

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On 28 Aug 2002, at 16:26, Daniel Suh wrote:

> Stanislav Ovcharenko wrote:
> > Hi;
> > 
> > I have an old PII-266 machine that I want to use as a
> > terminal to access Win XP machine with VNC. I am short
> > on hard disk space however, all I have is an old 1 GB
> > hard disk. I was wondering if that would be enough to
> > load an older FreeBSD release.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance.
> > 
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> > 
> 
> Hi.
> 
>  From what I know, you should be able to accomplish this with old FBSD. 
> Not the recent one, though. Their requirements are much more demanding. 
> Any FBSD version less than or equal to 4.0 stable could do this.
> 

This is way off- I have FreeBSD 4.6.2 running on a 486 DX2/66 with a 
540~ MB hard drive.

%df -h
Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a    98M    37M    53M    41%    /
/dev/ad0s1f   266M   112M   133M    46%    /usr
/dev/ad0s1e    49M   3.2M    42M     7%    /var
mfs:20         94M   4.0K    87M     0%    /tmp
procfs        4.0K   4.0K     0B   100%    /proc
%

It's a fairly minimalist configuration running a firewall and such, 
and I don't have the sources installed, nor the ports. When I need to 
install or build a kernel/world, I do the actual builds on another 
machine and install via NFS.

There are other ways of accomplishing this; the only reason I use NFS 
is to speed up the process of building. A 486 takes about 4 hours to 
build the kernel and a buildworld is something I'd never even attempt 
on it.

That said, a 1GB drive is plenty for a standalone box and could even 
do a buildworld, but you'd have to keep an eye on the size of your 
source and ports trees.

> Mark this word: "Do absolute minimal install and restrict your install 
> with only the ones you absolutely need to run VNC"

Well, I'd agree there. No reason to burden a machine with more than 
it needs. But a PII-266 with 1GB drive is plenty big enough to run 
FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE, with room to spare. Just don't install every 
port on the planet.

Regards,

Corey Snow


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