Minimize Gentoo to fit in internal flash of SheevaPlug

yesar · n00b Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 21

I'm not sure if this is the right location for this thread but it's mostly related to globalscape's guru plug.

with all found tutorials and docs i successfully installed gentoo on my sheevaplug and i used an external USB pendrive for not running into freespace problems.
now i want to move the installation to it's internal flash but currently my installation is about 700MB, that's about 300-400MB too much (i need some space for logs etc) and the flash provides only about 500MB.

so, the question is, how can i minimize my installation? can i savely delete man-pages & docs (/usr/share/doc, /usr/share/man, /usr/share/gtk-doc)? i'm not planing to compile any package on this plug in future (i'll use binpgk), so can i remove gcc? what else can be deleted/removed what's not needed for a running system? i already looked into world file if there is any unneeded package, but there are only the core packages i need for running the sheevaplug for my purpose.

Telemin · l33t Joined: 25 Aug 2005 Posts: 753 Location: Glasgow, UK

Also you can delete /usr/portage.

Yes, removal of gcc should not be an issue, nor should the removal of binutils, kernel sources can be cleaned out too.

Take a look at [url]research.csc.ncsu.edu/netsrv/sites/.../install_linux_on_soekris.pdf[/url] also. While designed for a different board it still looks at stripping out unneeded packages. I suggest you download the tarball and take a look at the script used to do the stripping.
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Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

Keep a backup of the folders you delete on an external drive so you can mount them if you ever need them again in the future.

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

I was thinking about this and there is a possibility that you could fit a full-blown Gentoo Linux installation onto the SheevaPlug with a compressed file system like Btrfs.

Another thing to take into consideration is whether or not the flash is raw flash or a hard-drive-like flash device (i.e. it implements wear levelling). If it is raw flash, then you would not want to use a filesystem meant for a mechanical hard drive (e.g. btrfs), because that would have no wear leveling and the flash will likely die quickly, especially with a swap partition. There are special filesystems for raw flash that implement wear levelling in the Linux kernel. Here are some options:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFFS2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LogFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAFFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBIFS

At a glance, YAFFS2, looks like the best option, but I suggest that you do your own research to determine which is best for you.

yesar · n00b Joined: 09 Mar 2005 Posts: 21

thank you guys, you really helped me a lot!

first of all, i took the soentoo scripts and looked into them to see whats valueable for me and the mentioned strip scripts are quiet good.
i got my installation with ext3 on a usb pen down to 480mb so i thought i'll give it a try on embedded flash disc. and here comes the best: while making my jffs2 image, it's only 180mb! (i didn't know that jffs2 is compressing the contents

) so i'm really happy with the result and maybe i'll keep some previous removed programms.

be the way: i'll keep jffs2. globalscale used this for their preinstalled debian image and i think i'm fine with it