Meeting Minimum Hardware Requirements
Once you have gathered information about your computer's hardware,
check that your hardware will let you do the type of installation
that you want to do.
Depending on your needs, you might manage with less than some of the
recommended hardware listed in the table below. However, most users
risk being frustrated if they ignore these suggestions.
A Pentium 4, 1GHz system is the minimum recommended for a desktop
system.
Recommended Minimum System Requirements
Install Type
RAM (minimum)
RAM (recommended)
Hard Drive
No desktop
&ref-no-desktop-ram-minimum;
&ref-no-desktop-ram-recommend;
&ref-no-desktop-hd;
With Desktop
&ref-with-desktop-ram-minimum;
&ref-with-desktop-ram-recommend;
&ref-with-desktop-hd;
The minimum values assumes that swap will be enabled and a non-live image is used.
The No desktop
value assumes that the text-based installer
(not the graphical one) is used.
The actual minimum memory requirements are a lot less than the numbers
listed in this table. With swap enabled, it is possible to
install &debian; with as little as &minimum-memory-strict;.
The same goes for the disk space requirements, especially if you
pick and choose which applications to install; see
for additional information on disk
space requirements.
The installer normally automatically enables memory-saving tricks to be able to
run on such low-memory system, but on architectures that are less tested
it may miss doing so. It can however be enabled manually by appending the
lowmem=1 or even lowmem=2 boot
parameter (see also and
).
On &architecture; the lowmem levels have not been tested, so automatic detection
is probably outdated and you thus probably need to pass the
boot parameter if your system has little memory.
Installation on systems with less memory
Installation images that support the graphical installer require more
memory than images that support only the text-based installer and should
not be used on systems with less than &minimum-memory; of memory. If
there is a choice between booting the text-based and the graphical installer,
the former should be selected on such systems.
or disk space available may be possible but is only advised for
experienced users.
It is possible to run a graphical desktop environment on older or
low-end systems, but in that case it is recommended to install
a window manager that is less resource-hungry than those of the
GNOME or KDE Plasma desktop environments; alternatives include
xfce4, icewm and
wmaker, but there are others to choose from.
It is practically impossible to give general memory or disk space
requirements for server installations as those very much depend on
what the server is to be used for.
Remember that these sizes don't include all the other materials which
are usually to be found, such as user files, mail, and data. It is
always best to be generous when considering the space for your own
files and data.
Disk space required for the smooth operation of the &debian-gnu; system
itself is taken into account in these recommended system requirements.
Notably, the /var partition contains
a lot of state information specific to &debian; in addition to its regular
contents, like logfiles. The
dpkg files (with information on all installed
packages) can easily consume 40MB. Also,
apt puts downloaded packages here before they are
installed. You should
usually allocate at least 200MB for /var, and a lot
more if you install a graphical desktop environment.