I'm running out of space very fast

LucNix said:
I seriously dislike the ports system,
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That's typically a symptom of not understanding it (yet) and not having discovered the sane tooling (yet).
LucNix said:
but there is a lot that is not available as pkg, only as port. It's not like I have a choice.
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This is certainly wrong. The fraction of ports that can't be distributed in binary form is very small.

I assume something else is going wrong here, so, provide some details (which package were you missing and what did you try?)
 
LucNix said:
This is a virtual machine installation for me to explore FreeBSD as much as I can and I decide if it's good enough for me to go to the bare metal. It's just dating. If I decide to marry, we will move to a much bigger house with lots of bedrooms and bathrooms.
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You can always increase the size of the VirtualBox VM to your needs, assuming the host has enough disk space.

ZFS can " Expand the device to use all available space." - zpool-online(8)
 
Just sharing a personal story - I actually had a 16GB SSD back in 2003 that I tried to install FreeBSD on. I stuffed it into a Dell machine that had 1 GB of RAM (Back in the day, that amount of RAM was a LOT). That Dell machine also originally had a 160GB HDD with WinXP. I ran out of space on that 16 GB SSD very quickly, even before I was able to install even Xorg. And I had no idea about ports back then.

My approach is to first see if I can get something useful going, like Xorg... If I get that going, then USB sticks are next. After that, KDE and Wine are not out of question.

Basically, I'm seeing OP offering very little to run FreeBSD, and expecting a lot right off the bat, before even establishing a good base/foundation. Kind of like expecting your date to even take you seriously after a quick run into a McDonald's, as opposed to cashing in a 3-month reservation at a Michelin 3-star restaurant... ?

If you want to explore any up-to-date OS in a VM, I'd recommend at least 64GB VHD with 6 GB of RAM. These specs are generally adequate for exploration, and allow you to decide if you just need more disk space, RAM, or to move to metal. If you think that a random user on the Internet like me is spouting nonsense, consider that reviewers like Distrowatch use VMs with similar specs.

That being said, nothing wrong with trying to pull off a usable install with minimal specs - there are people trying to do that. OP's goals seem to be pretty different here, though.
 
Not exactly.

I am a foreigner. I carry different culture. I speaka differenta languidge. In the distant lands where I come from, 10GB is plenty for the system including a very good amount of additional software. I gave FreeBSD 16GB. I thought that would be enough, but apparently FreeBSD is a high maintenance lady. Ladies in my distant land not so demanding.

Oh well, if the push is going to come down to shove, then OK, I'll take the lady to the highfallutin Michelin restaurant. But will she put out? Will she?

Please let no one fail to notice that I am not ever demanding anything. I am just asking questions. Does this work? And this? What about this? I'm testing and asking for guidance to overcome the hurdles. That's all I want. If it's not a match, then it's not a match. I'm looking for marriage, not rape.
 
I thought that FreeBSD is a Deamon. I play a lot with virtual machines and 16GB was always enough.
 
huet94tech said:
I play a lot with virtual machines and 16GB was always enough.
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With only the base OS, sure. Maybe some smallish services (Apache, PHP, etc). But any kind of desktop and you're going to run out very quickly.
 
LucNix said:
In the distant lands where I come from, 10GB is plenty for the system including a very good amount of additional software.
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10GiB really is nothing once you start building software (of relevant size) on that machine.

But with binary packages, you might get somewhere. Just for comparison, here's my router/firewall host with very few packages installed (including OpenVPN):
Code: 
root@router:~ # du -hs /
3.6G    /

And here's the /usr/local tree of a jail I use as an "application server", offering a full KDE desktop with chromium, gimp, inkscape, libreoffice etc:
Code: 
vmhost# du -hs /var/jail/greg/local 
6.1G    /var/jail/greg/local
Add around 1GiB for the base system to that plus some space for /var, /etc, it would still fit on 10GiB, if you REALLY want that. OFC not really recommended to run a system with "full" disk.
 
LucNix said:
In the distant lands where I come from, 10GB is plenty for the system including a very good amount of additional software. I gave FreeBSD 16GB. I thought that would be enough, but apparently FreeBSD is a high maintenance lady. Ladies in my distant land not so demanding.
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But FreeBSD has installed what you asked it to install. It took almost no storage for itself (the base system). I don't see how that makes a high maintenance system.
 
cracauer@ said:
But FreeBSD has installed what you asked it to install. It took almost no storage for itself (the base system). I don't see how that makes a high maintenance system.
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That is a good point. But it still uses up considerably more disk space than Debian ever did for me.

Maybe ZFS is a wasteful FS. For example, XFS can store a little more data than ext3 and a lot more than FAT.

I may try it again with UFS in the future.
 
LucNix said:
Not exactly.

I am a foreigner. I carry different culture. I speaka differenta languidge. In the distant lands where I come from, 10GB is plenty for the system including a very good amount of additional software. I gave FreeBSD 16GB. I thought that would be enough, but apparently FreeBSD is a high maintenance lady. Ladies in my distant land not so demanding.

Oh well, if the push is going to come down to shove, then OK, I'll take the lady to the highfallutin Michelin restaurant. But will she put out? Will she?

Please let no one fail to notice that I am not ever demanding anything. I am just asking questions. Does this work? And this? What about this? I'm testing and asking for guidance to overcome the hurdles. That's all I want. If it's not a match, then it's not a match. I'm looking for marriage, not rape.
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If you want to unlock the potential of FreeBSD, give it space and adequate metal/VM specs. Giving it just a 16 GB VHD is like asking a 747 to land on a helipad. ? Of course, you can use a helicopter instead of a 747, but you won't get nearly as far.
 
astyle said:
If you want to unlock the potential of FreeBSD, give it space and adequate metal/VM specs. Giving it just a 16 GB VHD is like asking a 747 to land on a helipad. ? Of course, you can use a helicopter instead of a 747, but you won't get nearly as far.
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Or you can land a 747 on a helipad but won't have too many survivors.

On the other hand:
Desktop environments typically take up a whole bunch of space. Building from source, takes up even more space in work directories and in soruce tarballs. "Should 16G be enough?" Perhaps, it all depends on what you installed. I've got a system with a 256G ssd, 231 G allocated for the ZFS partition and zfs list -o space tells me I have 193G available, so maybe 38G used. There's a lot of work data/files on it in /usr/home so basically 10G of that 38G used.

cd /usr/ports && make clean && cd /usr/ports/distfiles && rm -rf *
 
astyle said:
If you want to unlock the potential of FreeBSD, give it space and adequate metal/VM specs. Giving it just a 16 GB VHD is like asking a 747 to land on a helipad. ? Of course, you can use a helicopter instead of a 747, but you won't get nearly as far.
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Then Debian must be what, a Bombardier Global 7500?
 
LucNix said:
Then Debian must be what, a Bombardier Global 7500?
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Even that needs a decently sized runway to land, and will be unhappy on a 16GB VHD. Especially a recent release like bullseye. And, you can fit like, a couple of those Globals into a 747...
 
Please post the output of zfs list -ro space. This is the best way to see where space is being used in ZFS. (Including snapshots, reservations, etc.) Also zpool list -v for good measure.

It looks like you have a 800MB boot environment (read bectl(8) for further information) that, if you don't have a need for, you should free up: bectl destroy 230218-154642. Boot environments are wonderful ways to be able to roll-back an upgrade gone awry, or test changes, etc, but to be able to go back to something, you have to keep it around, hence, use space.
 
bsduck said:
To be honest I don't understand how a system using a few more GB of disk space than another can be a matter of concern in the personal computing world of 2023, unless we're talking about retro-computing on >20 years old machines with 30GB HDDs.
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People who can afford things struggle to understand the point of view of those who live on a tight budget. That's been true for millenia.
 
Eric A. Borisch said:
Please post the output of zfs list -ro space. This is the best way to see where space is being used in ZFS. (Including snapshots, reservations, etc.) Also zpool list -v for good measure.

It looks like you have a 800MB boot environment (read bectl(8) for further information) that, if you don't have a need for, you should free up: bectl destroy 230218-154642. Boot environments are wonderful ways to be able to roll-back an upgrade gone awry, or test changes, etc, but to be able to go back to something, you have to keep it around, hence, use space.
Click to expand...


Code: 
root@fsd1:~ # zfs list -ro space
NAME                  AVAIL   USED  USEDSNAP  USEDDS  USEDREFRESERV  USEDCHILD
a                     4.79G  9.26G        0B     96K             0B      9.26G
a/ROOT                4.79G  5.52G        0B     96K             0B      5.52G
a/ROOT/230218-154642  4.79G     8K        0B      8K             0B         0B
a/ROOT/default        4.79G  5.52G      768M   4.77G             0B         0B
a/tmp                 4.79G  52.2M        0B   52.2M             0B         0B
a/usr                 4.79G  3.67G        0B     96K             0B      3.67G
a/usr/home            4.79G  2.79G        0B   2.79G             0B         0B
a/usr/ports           4.79G   900M        0B    900M             0B         0B
a/usr/src             4.79G    96K        0B     96K             0B         0B
a/var                 4.79G   892K        0B     96K             0B       796K
a/var/audit           4.79G    96K        0B     96K             0B         0B
a/var/crash           4.79G    96K        0B     96K             0B         0B
a/var/log             4.79G   380K        0B    380K             0B         0B
a/var/mail            4.79G   124K        0B    124K             0B         0B
a/var/tmp             4.79G   100K        0B    100K             0B         0B
root@fsd1:~ # zpool list -v
NAME           SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
a             14.5G  9.26G  5.24G        -         -    29%    63%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
  ada0p3.eli  14.5G  9.26G  5.24G        -         -    29%  63.9%      -    ONLINE
 
Maybe this is partially the reason why so much space is being used?

menu.png


Except for the SQLite browser, I didn't ask for any of the other items, none of this Qt5 and GTK building stuff to be installed.
I suspect that came as dependencies of a port. Either way, I never asked for those.

By the way, why are the "Devices" and "Network" entries disabled in PCmanFM? They work in Linux.
 
LucNix said:
Except for the SQLite browser, I didn't ask for any of the other items, none of this Qt5 and GTK building stuff to be installed.
I suspect that came as dependencies of a port. Either way, I never asked for those.
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There are essentially three types of dependencies, build, run and library. Packages don't need or depend on build dependencies. When you build from ports those build dependencies are required. For example a compiler is only required when building the port, it's (usually) not a requirement or dependency of the resulting package. You can easily remove build dependencies, and any other orphaned dependency using pkg-autoremove(8).

Also remember that the official package repository is built from the ports tree using all the default options turned on. In a lot of cases a lot of additional features and options are turned on by default. Overall the developers at least try to make all 50.000+ packages play nice with each other. Which means people expect to be able to install KDE and Gnome at the same time, and expect them to play nice. If you only ever use KDE you don't need those Gnome dependencies, but they get installed anyway. That's where the flexibility of the ports tree comes in. You can actually bend and shape it to include any kind of options, features or compatibility that's appropriate for you. The packages have to cater to a majority, not specific use cases.
 
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