hard-disk space-saving installation

[mounty1]

Hello, I want to install Gentoo on an HP t5745 thin client which has a 2 GiB flash hard drive. All I'm expecting is a very minimal installation, probably based on XFCE or LXDE that provides a browser and maybe email and IM. Even that won't fit in 2 GiB of course so what I propose is that all the software related to emerge and updating is on a separate file server (which will not be running all the time) and auto-mounted as necessary. So the question is: what parts of the file system tree can safely be available only when updating the system ? Candidates are: /usr/src, /usr/portage, /var/db/pkg and /var/tmp/portage. Any others ? Or are there any objections to those in my list ?

There will be a more complete Gentoo environment for when the server is running, accessed via PXE boot and an NFS-mounted root, but that's a separate matter.
_________________
Michael Mounteney

[Hu]

You can completely omit /usr/src if you manage kernel builds outside Portage. Even if you manage them inside Portage, it should be adequate to mount it when you are installing, removing, or using kernel sources. /usr/portage can be mounted remotely. This is particularly helpful if you also store the distfiles remotely. Storing /var/db/pkg remotely might work, but you need to take special care that it is always available when Portage is used or you may get very strange results. Placing /var/tmp/portage on a remote system may work, but will severely impact your build performance. If you cannot keep that in a local tmpfs, I suggest that you not build anything on the client, and instead let a remote server build tbz2 packages for you, which you can then install locally.

[mounty1]

The .tbz2 idea is useful so thanks for that. I think the network slowth can be minimized by mounting with NFS4 asynchronously.
_________________
Michael Mounteney