'Damn Small' Gentoo?

[wuya]

Hi,

Have anyone ever tried getting an installed system to less than 200MB?

I plan to install Gentoo onto a laptop. It will probably have 10GB or less. I am too cheap to upgrade the HD.

So is it possible for me to get Gentoo down to a very small size? I am so not into the big distro/OS trend.
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Linux gentoo 2.6.14-gentoo-r5, Fluxbox

[moocha]

[Jake]

If you want a maintainable system, there's no way you'll get Gentoo in 200Mb. The portage tree alone is 125Mb, or more if you store it inefficiently, for example on 4k/block ext3. If you want a one-shot deal, you can mess around with chroots and obscure portage features to produce a system much smaller than 100Mb. Busybox with uClibc and a few basic daemons would probably weigh in at less than 20Mb.

If you want a usable and maintainable desktop, use Gentoo but be mindful of things like desktop environments, toolkits, CFLAGS, and filesystems. Blackbox, Fluxbox, and Openbox are quite small. Xfce has a few more features than *box but is still significantly smaller than KDE or GNOME, the most popular desktops. You'll want to stick to one toolkit, preferably GTK because QT is used by KDE, which you probably want to avoid. Compiling everything with -Os will probably help conserve space. Whatever you do, don't use -O3. If you use ext3, look on the forums for instructions on tuning it for space and performance. If you want a filesystem that's efficient by default, you can try reiser4. It's still officially unsupported, but it works for most people.

[Gherald]

[moocha]

[boogerman]

As much as I hate to say this, as I have come to love gentoo, if you really need to get it smaller than 200MB get slackware. That's what I used for about a year before I used gentoo and I got down to 130MB. But if you have a 10GB HD, my experience is deal with the less free space because I like gentoo better. But whatever suites your needs best.

[someguy]

i got my installs down to 220 mg with x before by using dietlibc and some other subroutine crap worked pretty well
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print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
while [ 1 ] ; do echo "*" | telnet ip.of.print.er 9100 ; done

[SDraconis]

[ripper2256]

[jlpence]

I have a 13 gig driv and even with all my MP3s, KDE, and random programs installed I have 7 gigs free. You have nothing to worry about.

That said, I'd think that one could greatly slim down the distro by tossing /usr/portage into a squashfs file and mounting that via a loopback device. It would be slow, but you could most likely get portage to fit in a few dozen megs, give or take. You'd have three problems with this, however:

* You'd have to unpack and re-squash the tree with every emerge --sync.
* You wouldn't be able to add tarballs to /usr/portage/distfiles, seeing how squashfs is read-only. So maybe you'd have to create a file formatted as ext2 via another loopback device, mounted at /usr/portage/distfiles.
* It'd be S-L-O-W. But hell, you asked for space, not speed.

Then be as stingy as possible with your USE flags, install only that which is needed, and manually go through and remove all extra documentation that you don't need. I know when I installed Gentoo via Stage 3 the full install was about 800mb. I don't think you can get it under 200, but under 500 is more than possible if you're creative enough. You could probably get it even less than that, but then you start running up against the question of "How much can you modify a system before it becomes too much of a pain in the ass to use and administrate?"

This is all theoretical, mind you. I haven't done any of this. :)