I have successfully set up a working mapnik tile server under Ubuntu 14.04 using the OSMBright style. For testing purposes, I downloaded and imported the geodata for Luxembourg. The file was only 16MB in size and the import only took a minute.
Next, I wanted to add the geodata for Germany, which is way bigger (about 4GB). During the import, I ran out of disk space (which was quite sparse because I had to use a VM at work).
For our purpose, we actually only need railway lines, stations and cities without any more detail such as individual houses, streets, other POI's. As a beginner with OSM and Mapnik server: is there a way to omit unneccessary data when importing geodata in order to minimize the required resources? Or can I only create a style that does not display the unneccessary things (which wouldn't save disk space but would probably increase performance)?