How much disk space for ubuntu

If you do not use the universe repositories often, you probably will not need much space here. If you are running a server, or plan to expand it yourself, plan ahead when sizing this.

The above recommendations assume you are using large modern hard drives and can afford the space. However, that does not take into account the space needed for a file-system or a swap partition. It is more realistic to give yourself a little bit more than 15 GB of space. Give yourself GB to have some space left for actually doing things. If your file-system is full to the brim, you will feel some performance loss.

A certain percentage of an ext3 file-system is dedicated to root, as a way of preventing a rogue process from filling the disk to the point that the system is unusable. Also, the anti-fragmentation strategies used by Linux file-systems require that the disk is not close to full. If you are short on disk space before you install, you can tell the installer not to use extra disk space. The standard Ubuntu desktop installation requires 2GB. In my experience, 30 GB is enough for most kinds of installations.

A Minimal installation of Ubuntu It is possible that more space is required during the installation itself, as a Minimal installation may start with a Normal installation and then remove a predefined set of packages. Absolutely yes, Ubuntu is a very light OS and it will work perfectly.

The base install of Linux requires about 4 GB of space. In reality, you should allocate at least 20 GB of space for the Linux installation. Once Ubuntu has loaded you will be presented with the following screen:. To begin the installation, click on the "Install Ubuntu" button.

The installer will ask a couple of questions relating to the installation process. The first question provides the choice of whether to install 3rd party non-open source software to support the playback of MP3 files on the system.

Some users object fervently to using any software to which the source code is not freely available. If you are one of those people then do not select this option. If, on the other hand, you just want the best experience from your Ubuntu installation then this option is recommended. Secondly, the option is provided to update the software packages that comprise the Ubuntu distribution during the installation.

Ubuntu, just like most other operating systems, continues to be updated with bug fixes and security patches long after it has been released to the public. If this option is selected, the installer will download any updates issued since the Ubuntu installation image was released and applies them to the system. If you choose not to perform this update during the installation process these updates can still be applied at any time after the installation completes. Having made appropriate selections, click the Forward button to proceed to the disk allocation screen.

At this point, the installer will have detected the presence of an existing operating system on the target disk drive and will provide a number of options in terms of how the disk should be used to accommodate the Ubuntu installation:.

Given that it is our intention to configure a dual boot system, the option to Install them side by side, choosing between them at each startup is the desired choice.

With this option selected, click the Install Now button to proceed. The subsequent screen allows the amount of disk space allocated to each operating system in this case Windows and Ubuntu to be configured:.

At this point it is necessary to decide how much of your Windows partition you wish to donate to the Ubuntu installation. You can definitely do with less but there is a good chance you will need more. It all depends on your use case. We got it down to 2. We used two freshly installed test systems in VirtualBox.

So take the values above as the absolute minimum for the OS and add whatever space you think you might need to for files. If you remove the swap file you can actually get lower though. We got the server down to 2.

See the section further below on swap files.