Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 16:08:53 -0600 From: "Andrew L. Gould" <algould@datawok.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: John <john@starfire.mn.org> Subject: Re: Out of the frying pan... Message-ID: <200501131608.53735.algould@datawok.com> In-Reply-To: <20050113152405.A5302@starfire.mn.org> References: <20050113152405.A5302@starfire.mn.org>
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On Thursday 13 January 2005 03:24 pm, John wrote: > I just keep painting myself into corners, and I'm hoping that people > can point out some (presumably dumb) things that I am doing, and > recommend a course of action that will get me back to where I want > to be. > > I have a Compaq Armada M700 on which I had installed FreeBSD > 4.9-STABLE (as of February, 2004) and life was pretty good. There > were a few annoyance, but it was a useful working environment. I > didn't have Java running, I probably needed to find a better browser > than Konqeror, and the sound, touch-pad, and suspend/resume functions > didn't work, so there were things I would have liked to have > improved. > > All that changed when I tried to install Win98SE in the lower > partition I had reserved for that purpose. It totally trashed my > / (with /usr) filesystem, though leaving /home (and /var) alone. > [ I bit the bullet and bought Windows XP Home, which installed > fine - but that's for my kids - I want my FreeBSD! ] > > This seemed like a good time to move forward. I had a set of 5.2.1 > CD's, so I installed them. > > Things didn't work very well. Part of it was ACPI problems I didn't > correctly recognize, but my biggest problem was that I couldn't get > OpenOffice to install, because it had moved to Xorg from XFree86, > along with FreeBSD 5.3. > > I had a slower, desktop machine with a plenty of disk space, so > I loaded up the source distribution from 5.2.1, cvsup'ed to -STABLE, > did a buildworld, buildkernel, mounted /usr/src and /usr/obj via > NFS, and upgraded the laptop to 5.3. Since then, I've been playing > a challenging game of "update the package" to try to get all the > requisite packages for Xorg and kde in place (not to mention > OpenOffice, and I'm not even there yet). > > Have you already guessed my problem? My / and /usr single > filesystem, which is 1.5Gb in size, that had been about 80% full with > XFree86, kde, fvwm, and OpenOffice is now 101% full and I haven't > even gotten all of kde installed (and all the dependent packages), > let alone OpenOffice. > > I see my options as this: > 1) Try to figure out the dependency trees for kde, install kde-lite > instead, and rip out the packages I don't need (theoretically > possible - but feasible?) > 2) Back up /home, reinstall a minimum 5.2.1 system, do the > installworld and installkernel again, and then do the install of the > kde (or kde-lite) then restore /home (but how much larger do I need > to make / and /usr?) > 3) Buy or build a 5.3 installation set, and redo the installation, > using only the distributions I need, and hope it fits. > > Other suggestions? Anything obvious I'm missing? You folks have > been extrememly helpful so far, so I'm hoping there's a good solution > I'm just missing! 1. Upgrade the hard drive. 2. If you're going to install Windows, install it before you install FreeBSD. 3. Definitely go with a clean installation of FreeBSD 5.3 rather than 5.2.1. 4. Building OpenOffice requires massive resources. Use the binary packages. 5. When you install from ports, make sure you "make install clean" to remove working files when they're no longer needed. 6. Use portupgrade (in the ports) to upgrade applications; but exclude OpenOffice. Not only can portupgrade take care of dependencies, but it has options to look for binary packages online before opting to compile from source. Best of luck, Andrew Gould
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