Re: [Devel] estimating disk space usage

[Conrad Newton <conrad.newton@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From Paolo M. Pumilia on Saturday, 2003-07-12 at 17:35:55 +0200:
> Can you point me at some utilities to estimate changes in the used space 
> on the knoppix-like cd, when adding or deleting application packets?

There is no utility that can do this, but there are some
rules of thumb.  Roughly speaking, Knoppix delivers a
3-to-1 compression ratio.  As a first guess then, if
you add a 15MB package, it will add 5MB to the CD.

Before I compress a CD, I typically have about 2 GB
total sitting on the hard disk.  The result of the
compression is a 700MB CD.

Compression is a tricky business, however.  If the
extra file has a lot of redundancy, your compression
ratio may be much better.  Conversely, for a very
random file, much worse.  So for individual packages,
it can be hard to predict.

Conrad