On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 13:35 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote: > On Thu, 2005-06-16 at 21:23 -0700, Zac Medico wrote: > > Ow Mun Heng wrote: > > >>>I'm talking about something stripped down. Perhaps not to a size of 8MB > > >>>but something less than 100MB would be good. > > >>> > > >>>How does one do that? > > >>> > > >>>This will be a box which will not have portage included once everything > > >>>is up.
I've only just noticed this thread, but I thought you might like to know what I tried. Some time ago I wanted to install gentoo on a flash disk that was 64Mb, to run on an industrial pc, while leaving enough space for about 12Mb of our applications, plus a few logs, etc. This is how I ended up doing it: Firstly I installed a 20Gb harddrive as well as the flash disk in the one pc. I installed the minimal gentoo that I required on the hd (sshd, iptables, gcc, ppp, vi, ftpd, etc) Now, touch every file on the file system, and take note of the date. (maybe I set the system date back a few years before I did this, I can't remember) Then I booted to the new system on the hd and did some basic operations - ssh in, ftp in, etc. Then boot again to the live cd, and use find to find all files on the hard drive that have an access time greater than the date you just noted. - These will be the absolute minimum set of files your pc requires to run. Copy these files from the hd to the flashdisk, or whatever your permanent install disk is. That's just about it! You will now have a functioning gentoo system which is much less than 64Mb. Well, it's not exactly a gentoo system, because you'll skip all the portage stuff and a lot of others, but that's the idea. Now - there are some gotcha's! 1. make sure you _don't_ specify noatime when you mount the hd originally. 2. make sure you copy symbolic links, as well as their targets - because you need a lot of these symlinks for libs and so on. This one really had me confused with lots of weird errors. 3. you may find that you didn't do enough to access all the files you would normally need. This isn't an exact process, but its pretty good for getting a small distro. For a period of time while we were testing this lite-distro, we had the harddrive installed (but unmounted) so when we needed something that we forgot, just mount the drive and cp it over! In fact, we even left the system dual-booting into the 'lite' and 'normal' gentoo for a while till we ironed out all the bugs. This may be a bit of extra work, but it creates a small install! HTH, -- Iain Buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
