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.