Ubuntu in the News: Test of distributions for an old laptop

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 10:12:47PM +0100, Paul Sladen wrote:
> On Sun, 21 May 2006, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > it is more difficult than you might expect to calculate the _exact_
> > requirements, so it is an estimate.
> 
> $user_sectors_on_livecd_image + 100MB would be a fairly good estimate and a
> *completely* full partition on first install is going to lead to bad omens
> as soon as some logs files, an apt-get update and Firefox's cache fill up
> '/var'.
> 
> With a selection of 'du's at build-time it should be fairly reliable to work
> out whether the install is going to fit into any particular custom-
> partitioning arrangement by checking that any mount-points are larger than
> the encompassing top-level directory contents.

We're talking about the text-mode install here, where it's far more
complicated than a selection of du calls; in order to get accurate
figures here we'd have to pull apart all the packages in the standard
installation and calculate the amount under each plausible mount point.
Installed-Size: only gives the total.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]