Hi Rodrigo, First of all let me say Thank You for this very detailed and rational bugreport!
Rodrigo <[email protected]> wrote (Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:31:51 +0100): > > I ran the debian 13.2 installation on my machine, with something like 55 GB > free space (Windows and data got the rest of the disk). > > I chose guided partitioning of the contiguous free space, with root (/) and > /home in different partitions, so the installer assigned 10 GB to the root (/) > partition and the rest of the contiguous available space to the /home. > Installation continued by installing the base system and when installing > programs I added KDE environment and web server to the initial chosen software > to install. The installation got stuck at some point, leaving no option other > than exit the installation and without any comment on what had failed. > > After that I retried the installation in text mode and without choosing KDE > environment or web server, just standard tools and GNOME. It went well. Once > logged in I installed KDE and was then that I ran out of space in root > partition. > > Third try (I didn't want to boot from a liveUSB to redo the partitioning), I > ran again the installation, this time with manual partition so I assigned 20 > Gb > to root partition, and created a separated /var and /home partition. > > So, the thing is that: > 1 - 10 GB seems not to be enough space for root partition if a user is > installing aditional software. Well, these kind of bugreports are often difficult. Depending on the use case the user intends for his machine, 55G of free disk space might be much or very low. So, the automatic partition recipes are always an compromise: on a server, you need much space for partitions like /srv, on a workstation you need space on the root and maybe home partition, and so on. We have different recipes for guided partitioning to fit these requirements, but we often receive reports, where users see different assumptions etc. Overall, 55G of disk space is not that much these days for the OS and user space, if you want to use a generic setup (aka no manual partitioning). We cannot know what you want to do with KDE. Do you need much space on /home for editing videos? Coming back to your 10G root partition: that value is not static, but it depends on the size of your harddisk/the size of the available free space on your harddisk. A bigger harddisk like 128G or 256G would get a much bigger root partition. > 2 - This is not mentioned in the Installation Guide (or I haven't been able > to > find it) Maybe we could improve this, yes. > 3 - If the user chooses the option of guided installation with / and /home > separated, the installation system will assign 10 GB of space to the root > partition, without asking otherwise. > > 4 - Once assigned, and in order to change the allocated space, if the user > wants to change it (which was my case), the only way to do it is by manual > partitioning of the disk. Yes, it's true, that's the chose between Guided and Manual partitioning. You cannot choose the first one, and then at the same time expect to get the latter (at least partman currently is not smart enough for such concept). > Some improvements for this "failure" during the installation would be: > > - Improve the Installation Guide to suggest more than 10 GB of space in root > partition in case additional SW is installed (would be nice to say this in > section 6.3.4. Partitioning and Mount Point Selection, rather than do it in > the > Anex C). ACK. > - Give the option during the guided partitioning to change the "default" 10 GB > assigned to root partition As stated above, that "10G for root" is not a default, it depends on the overall disk size. > - If the installation crashes because of lack of space during the installation > of programs, would be nice that the user is aware of this situation (I got no > clue of what was causing the installation to crash). This has been mentioned several times, yes! Sorry, that this is still an issue! Holger -- Holger Wansing <[email protected]> PGP-Fingerprint: 496A C6E8 1442 4B34 8508 3529 59F1 87CA 156E B076
