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 Type RAM (minimum) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive No desktop 256 megabytes 512 megabytes 4 gigabytes With Desktop 1 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) 3216 859 4075 • KDE Plasma 4584 1316 5900 • Xfce 2509 683 3192 • LXDE 2539 693 3232 • MATE 2851 762 3613 • Cinnamon 4676 1324 6000 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 desktop 256 megabytes 512 megabytes 4 gigabytes + No desktop 512 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 <hwans...@mailbox.org> PGP-Fingerprint: 496A C6E8 1442 4B34 8508 3529 59F1 87CA 156E B076
