How much space to allocate for Gentoo?

degras · Guru Joined: 05 Jan 2006 Posts: 460

Currently I have a Windows 7 system with a single hard drive having 113Gb of used space and 118Gb of free space. I am going to make this a dual boot system. I'm wondering how much space to allocate for Gentoo. I will be using Gentoo for development in Python and maybe some C++. Checking on the disk shrinker in Windows I see that I can shrink by 43Gb, is that plenty of space for Gentoo? I don't envisage having much data.

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 12:53 am Post subject:

40GB is probably enough. Around 20GB is where things start to get a lot easier, less than that you'll run into disk space issues while working with Gentoo (unless if you never patch, don't keep portage tree and temp space on the same disk, or don't use any applications at all.)

I tried some daily use systems with 10GB or less with a full DE install, it gets very annoying quickly. It used to be enough...
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Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

20GB for a development install should be enough - that's about how much is in use on my rootfs (no /home), including some fairly huge games sitting in /opt and distfiles. You'll probably want more than that to have space to actually build things, unless you use tmpfs for that.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I use four 16 GB partitions, /, /usr/portage, /home and /var, which give more than enough space for a pretty complete development environment. OTOH, there are a few other partitions mounted on /home, such as the 48GB partition holding VirtualBox images, and 32G or so of music, so YMMV

Will

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 1:29 pm Post subject:

20 GB, as someone said above, is the bare minimum to be able to use Gentoo fluently in a regular form. Of course, this can vary from one system to another, but still Gentoo will require more space than other distros since having a working toolchain and python interpreter is not optional, and you also need the kernel source tree (at least one of them). A lot of that space remains empty most of the time, but it will eventually be needed to build big packages and for portage temp files and distfiles.

You must add whatever space you need in your $HOME directory to be able to work. Developers needs vary greatly, you know, once you start adding toolkits and sdks you never know when you'll stop, and those are big :lol: