Hi all,
as a follow-up to #1032940, I think we have some open points in the doc
regarding
RAM/disk space requirements.
In the installation-guide, we have 3 places referring to needed RAM/disk space
size, and unfortunately they are not very well conform with each other:
(at least for the end-user POV, who does not know all the details and tricks)
chapter 2:
https://d-i.debian.org/doc/installation-guide/en.amd64/ch02s05.html
says
"You must have at least 780MB of memory and 1160MB of hard disk space to
perform a normal installation."
chapter 3:
https://d-i.debian.org/doc/installation-guide/en.amd64/ch03s04.html
says
"Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements
Install TypeRAM (minimum) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive
No desktop 256 megabytes 512 megabytes 4 gigabytes
With Desktop1 gigabytes 2 gigabytes 10 gigabytes"
And chapter D.2:
https://d-i.debian.org/doc/installation-guide/en.amd64/apds02.html
has a table for different tasks:
"Task Installed size (MB) Download size (MB) Space needed to install
(MB)
Desktop environment
• GNOME (default) 3216859 4075
• KDE Plasma 458413165900
• Xfce2509683 3192
• LXDE2539693 3232
• MATE2851762 3613
• Cinnamon467613246000
Web server 85 19 104
SSH server 2 1 3 "
I remember some reports from users in the past, saying that the values in
chapter 2 are totally unrealistic, and the answer from debian-boot was
"Well, those values are minimal values over all archs", so a light-weight
arch could work with those values indeed. But for most users those values
are not real-world.
But hey, for those people, there is the link to chapter 3:
"Note that these are fairly minimal numbers. For more realistic figures,
see Section 3.4, “Meeting Minimum Hardware Requirements”.
So, if chapter 2 advise is of no value at all, why not skip it completely?
Or make it compliant with chapter 3. ???
I would like to get this into a better shape, so that the different chapters
are talking "with the same speach" (and don't conflict).
To get this done, I propose to change (or unify) the values in chapter 2 + 3,
so
that they show a consistent picture.
I did some test installations with QEMU on amd64.
The results are:Installing with 256 MB of RAM fails, the installer
stopps with "320 MB RAM is required"
Installing with 512 MB of RAM switches to low-memory
mode installer, but the installation succeeds.
So I propose to change chapter 3 values like
Install Type RAM (minimum) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive
- No desktop256 megabytes 512 megabytes 4 gigabytes
+ No desktop512 megabytes 1 gigabytes 4 gigabytes
With Desktop 1 gigabytes 2 gigabytes 10 gigabytes
So:
1.
To have chapter 2 compliant with chapter 3 (regarding RAM size)
and
2.
since we have changed the minimal harddisk value to 4 gigabytes in
bug#1032940 (harddisk size)
and
3.
since users will probably misinterpret the phrase of "a normal installation"
here
(What is a *normal* installation? What is *normal* in this case? I would skip
the *normal* here and just talk of *an installation*. )
I would propose to change chapter 2
like
- You must have at least 780MB of memory and 1160MB of hard disk space to
- perform a normal installation."
+ You must have at least 512MB of memory and 4GB of hard disk space to
+ perform an installation."
Comments?
Holger
--
Holger Wansing
PGP-Fingerprint: 496A C6E8 1442 4B34 8508 3529 59F1 87CA 156E B076
