Small Gentoo howto??

bastibasti · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2006 Posts: 581

I have been trying to build a small gentoo system many different ways. (with X...)
I tried stages, uclibc, and

Januszzz · Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 7:42 am Post subject: Many ways to go

There are many ways you can take.

1. Pick up embedded stage from experimental stages, then start as usually until your desires are done. Then go and unmerge all the unnecessary apps. This method is fine, until you find an app which needs full GLIBC features (ie. heartbeat, Vmware Server Console etc.). In this method - with Xorg you can have your system about 200M. Here you need to do some initscript fiddling (that hurts sometimes).
2. If you do not mind becoming somewhat larger, you can take standard i686 stage and build your system as usually. Using less USE options you can have your system about 300M (after unmerging apps and doing some more fat trimming). You are full Glibc, so you can safely install even OpenOffice on your embedded ;-)

2. Use GNAP (http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/gnap.xml). Here you can have really tiny system starting at 15M. Even after equipping it with Xorg you can be less than 120M. There is extra bonus - you do not have to fiddle with configs, they are already prepared to be read-only (you can boot from CD). And extra thing is that you can have clean-as-your-a.. system... :-)

Remember - here you are on uClibc.
3. Use Tinygentoo (http://gentoo-wiki.com/TinyGentoo) - here you can start from as less as 3M :-)

but it is harder and not exactly more productive. Must-go for Gentoo geeks.

These are my ways, but there are many others I'm sure.

Regards,
Januszzz

bastibasti · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2006 Posts: 581

Is there a way of checking the dependencies of a packet to another before unmerging it?

Mad Ghetto · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Auckland

To see what depends on a package, you can use equery from gentoolkit:

equery depends <package name>