2.3.2 Planning Use of the System
Disk space requirements and your partitioning scheme are influenced by the type of installation you decide to create.
For your convenience, Debian offers a number of default “profiles” some of which are listed later in this section. Profiles are simply preselected sets of packages designed to provide certain desired capabilities on your system. Installation is easier since packages that fit your desired profile are automatically marked for installation. Each given profile lists the size of the resulting system after installation is complete. Even if you don’t use these profiles, this discussion is important for planning, since it will give you a sense of how large your partition or partitions need to be. The following are some of the available profiles and their sizes:
Server_std. This is a small server profile, useful for a stripped-down server, that does not have a lot of niceties for shell users. It basically has an FTP server, a web server, DNS, NIS, and POP. It will take up around 50MB. Of course, this is just the size of the software; any data you serve would be additional.
Dialup. This profile would be good for a standard desktop box, including the X Window system, graphics applications, sound, editors, etc. The size of the packages will be around 500MB.
Work_std. This profile is suitable for a stripped-down user machine without the X Window system or X applications. It is also suitable for a laptop or mobile computer. The size is around 140MB. It is possible to have a simple laptop setup including X with less than 100MB.
Devel_comp. This is a desktop setup profile with all the popular development packages, such as Perl, C, and C++. It requires around 475MB. Assuming you are adding X and some additional packages for other uses, you should plan for approximately 800MB of disk space for this type of installation.
Remember that these sizes don’t include all the other materials that are normally found, such as user files, mail, and data. It is always best to be generous when considering the space for your own files and data. Notably, the Debian /var directory contains a lot of state information. The installed package management files can easily consume 20MB of disk space. In general, you should allocate at least 50MB for the /var directory because system log files are also stored there.
2.3.3 PC Disk Limitations
A PC BIOS generally adds additional constraints for disk partitioning. There is a limit to how many “primary” and “logical” partitions a drive can contain. Additionally, there are limits to where on the drive the BIOS looks for boot information. More information can be found in the Linux Partition mini-HOWTO[[6]]. This section will include a brief overview to help you plan most situations.