How to keep your OS size minimal

lcidw · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 18 Oct 2004 Posts: 77

Since i have Gentoo on a Celeron 266 laptop, 64 MB memory, with only a 3 GB harddisk, i need some tips on how to keep the installation as small as possible.

So please reply with everything you know!

Only thing i know now, is cleaning the portage distfiles dir..

clean /usr/portage/distfiles

bjd · Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 11:34 am Post subject:

The kernel sources take up a couple of hundred MB, so unmerge them or delete the directory (not sure which is the most advisable). You will however need to re-emerge them if anything wants to build against them. You could maybe tar up your current sources and keep them handy if you don't want to keep downloading them.

The portage tree is another one. You could look at this thread to compress the tree down. Or you could host the tree on another system and share it via NFS.

There are also some directories in /tmp where emerge stores temporary compilation files, they can be cleaned out. I can't remember offhand which ones though

My base install on my laptop took only 330MB with the portage tree and kernel sources removed. That doesn't include X or a WM though...

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Don't install what you don't need.
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Jeremy_Z · l33t Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 671 Location: Shanghai

Dear, and i am struggling with 14Gb ...

Take a look at yacleaner, i run it when i almost run out of space and it does wonders cleaning tmp files (and portage tmp files which for some reasons like to take around 1Gb ..)

Don't try to install some heavy GUI (like OpenOffice, Desktop Environments ..) keep it simple and light. For this, i think DamnSmallLinux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/) is a good source of inspiration, it is amazing what they put on 50Mb.

Maybe you can give us what you need to do on your system.

Oh and i forgot, don't dowload porn

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sanakan · n00b Joined: 21 Nov 2005 Posts: 2

having the same problem over here - PII 266, 2.8GB hd...

but as its a machine for my mother only to play some minor games & watch dvd, it 'should' work out

atm, i'm installing gnome on it, used 2GB so far (base install, X & in the middle of compiling gnome), without any special clensing of files.
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Catch-22 · Apprentice Joined: 22 Oct 2004 Posts: 244

I managed to install Gentoo on a Wallstreet Powerbook (I think the specs are 233MHz G3, 32Mb RAM, 2Gb HD). I managed to squeeze X + fluxbox + xchat into it and it works fine as a dedicated IRC client. The lack of ram doesn't *really* matter - it does obvioulsy effect the amount of swap you allocate. With a lack of HD space it means that expanding distfiles and then compiling them gets very difficult. If you must compile things I'd recommend you do it early on when you have the most HD space free and then use a packagecd or a package mirror. I'd suggest also setting very aggressive "negative" USE flags (eg. ones that preclude things from getting compiled in). There are also CFLAGS you can set in order to create "smaller" binaries but I don't have any experience in that so I can't comment as to whether it's a good idea or not. If you get desperate and have another machine handy you can use nfs to mount directories like distfiles from another machine.

ChojinDSL · l33t Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 784

Simply create a chroot on your desktop gentoo machine, compile everything that you need and then only copy or rsync the required directories. Leave out stuff like tmp and /usr/portage and /usr/src/linux*

micko · Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2005 11:20 am Post subject:

I installed Gentoo on P 166 MMX with 92MB ram and 1,5GB HD. I did all of the compiling with my laptop and kept the system as minimal as possible. System + Xorg, Fluxbox, Firefox-bin and aterm. I think that's about it. Might be a good thing not to install newest Xorg, but maybe some older XFree, if the computer is old and slow.