I am seriously considering buying a Chromebook and use crouton to install Ubuntu, an OS for Linux. However, due to the typically small internal disk space of no more than 32G(as least compared to current Windows or Mac based systems) for a Chromebook, I need to know beforehand if the disk space these Ubuntu applications I will want on my internal hard drive are going to take up more than what a Chromebook can handle. After all, if I want Ubuntu applications that take up well over 32G of internal disk space, and my Chromebook only has room for 32G, why buy a Chromebook? So how can I find out the file size of Ubuntu Applications Before I download them to Chromebook in Developer Mode?
2 Answers
Don't worry about it. You can fit plenty of applications in 32GB.
If you really want to measure, boot a Ubuntu LiveCD and issue the commands:
touch /tmp/emptyfile
sudo mount --bind /tmp/emptyfile /var/lib/dpkg/status
yes no | sudo apt-get install (list of packages)
sudo umount /var/lib/dpkg/status
It should output "After this operation, XYZA MB of additional disk space will be used". Then you know, approximately.
Bind-mounting an empty file on /var/lib/dpkg/status fools apt-get
into thinking that no packages are currently installed (so that the total is accurate even though some packages might already be installed on the LiveCD).
aptitude
will tell you the size of the download and the disk usage change for each operation, apt-get
does too.