Advice for 8GB flash drive - Minimal Build

[FastTurtle]

I'm working up a bare bones AMD64 (no multilib) for an 8GB flash drive. So any advice on Small, Lightweight WM's like Fluxbox with icons or a menu? The only other apps I'm currently looking at installing is Firefox (need it due to Google Docs) along with a pdf reader. There may be one or two more but haven't thought of them so far.

I'll be placing the portage source files on a 2nd 8GB flash drive in order to save room on the system drive and because the packages can quickly take lots of room

Any advice about problems/bugs that I need to be aware of?
I do know my system will boot from a flash drive - used it recently to do a clean Win7-64 install.

[eccerr0r]

I've had Gentoo installed in 4GB, but the key problem is that portage/emerge builds will use up much more than that. The 2GB is not enough for portage and temp build space.
(This was for my 4GB stock SSD for my eeePC with Gnome. I was using an 8GB SD card for portage. But now Firefox builds take one heck of a lot of disk space and memory I wouldn't try that again...)
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Core-i7-2700K@4.1GHz/8GB RAM/180GB SSD/Intel HD3000 graphics
What the heck am I advocating?

[FastTurtle]

Guess it wasn't clear enough that I have (2) 8GB flash drives. One for the system and the other temporary for Portage.

The smallest disk I've managed to install Gentoo onto was a 100Mb Zip disk. Had quite a few apps but was console only. If I'd been able to use that test system as a server, it would have been almost perfect but I needed the full capabilities from a 20GB disk. That was back when the Minimal disk image was a meager 50M, not the current 150+ and we started from stage1 if you wanted a real test. Today, I'd just about kill for the base Stage2 that we had back then as it would certainly allow me to strip things down even further unlike the current stage3 we're forced to deal with.

[The Doctor]

The smallest space I have installed on was about 8 gigs. I got X working with fluxbox.
For a small WM I would use lxde. It is extremely light I got it working on a virtual machine with 60 mb of ram. I like it because it feels complete and it is small. You could just run openbox, but that is just about the same as fluxbox.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

[FastTurtle]

[eccerr0r]

SSDs are flash drives. And if I got a full GNOME install with Firefox in 4GB, space isn't an issue (granted, there was less than 400MB left)? Portage and the build trees are the limiting factor and to this day I still have the portage tree on an SD card.

Gentoo by default is not perfectly designed for SSD/Flash drives, it still writes stuff to /etc sometimes but it's getting better. Recently it did move boot status information to ramdisk/tmpfs and that's a huge step in the right direction to save wear and tear on bootup.

As for specific issues pertinent to USB disks (mechanical or flash) you may want to look at some of the livecd/usb stuff... Key nastiness is how the drive assignment changes depending on what you have plugged into the system at the time (all sorts of hotplug issues.)
_________________
Core-i7-2700K@4.1GHz/8GB RAM/180GB SSD/Intel HD3000 graphics
What the heck am I advocating?

[The Doctor]

[FastTurtle]

Just found the portage database listing for lxde and it appears to be as bad as Gnome/KDE/XFCE with the many small packages. Don't know if it's smaller then what I was looking for in the wm where so far, fluxbox is leading. Main reason that fluxbox is leading is familiar with the menu structure, which is basically plain text and can be edited using nano if neccessary.

From a functionality standpoint, I will have the basics covered, Firefox for web, gv for PDFs, Mplayer for Audio/Video/Images, Lbibre/Open Office for docs/business needs, 7zip with Rar support for archives along with a file manager (mc is familiar or one of the newer ones. All depends on the dependencies.

One reason I'm not including email is spam and only pop3 support by my ISP. Have to use the webmail interface but that's not a problem since it works nicely with firefox.

The only changes I'd atually need to make for some of the folks I support is adding Flash and using something that looks closer to XP. Icewm is about as close as I've seen (they've got a Win95 theme) so it would give me something to introduce those folks to Linux with. Means I could possibly expand this build into a live-usb version to into people to Gentoo and/or Linux in general.

[yngwin]

You could try razorqt.
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"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

[gorkypl]

8GB is plenty of space - I have a full-featured powerful workstation, and with many packages installed I am just below the 8GB of total disk usage. This is including /usr/portage but without /home (size of home directory greatly depends on usage scenario).

[avx]

never tried gv, but I'm a huge fan of mupdf, very fast, good rendering and minimal deps(no poppler).
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[gorkypl]

Ah, of course - I read 'gv' and thought about ps files. I am also using mupdf for pdfs

[FastTurtle]

So far I've decided on these:

Fluxbox for the window manager though lxde is another possibility. Don't have any real issue with all the small files if it works. Main reason fluxbox is leading though is familiarity with the menu structure - plain text can be edited with nano if needed. Icewm has quite a few themes available, some of them look just like XP/Vista and offers possibility of easing some users to Linux. Everyone has a few of them they deal with. The type of people that do things the same way they've done it for years and don't want to change. Hell I've got some friends still using WinMe and they refuse to buy anything new because it works for them. Still Open to discussion

Main reason for Firefox over a webkit is add-ons and extensions. I am not giving up my noscript, down them all, Ghostery and a whole bunch of others. Then there's the fact that all of my bookmarks and such are already in Firefox, so all I have to do is copy the profile over from Windows. No Changes - Closed

Haven't really looked at the Media playback issue yet. Only reason I listed Mplayer is familiar with the name. Will have to look at Mplayer2 - so it's still open to suggestions.

On the image viewing issue, was checking the lxde site and they have some nice screens of both GimageView and GPicView. Both of which look promising. Gimageview appears to be similar to the old AC/DC image view/gallery view app while Gpicview looks more like Windows Photo Viewer. Both of them appear to be useful though I'm leaning towards Gimageview due to the thumbnails being displayed. Of course, wont have that much space to download lots of images so that one may be overkill for this build. Maybe use it on a full dekstop build once the testing is done. Optional as yet

Those blasted PDF's that most hardware manuals use is the only reason for GV even being considered but there's just too damn many of them not to have something. So the fewest dependencies wins this one and GV only needs ghostview installed. Closed

7zip is about the best archive tool I've found and depend on it on Windows. Add Rar support and it handles almost everything I've thrown at it over the years. Closed

Haven't checked the package db to see what name they're using for Libre/Open Office - Guess it's Libre now. No problem and yes it might be overkill and I'm still debating it as yet. Might not make the cut after all due to Google Docs. That works and doesn't take valuable space in /home. Open to Discussion

Looked at the screens for PCManFM and it's usable - Gives Lxde another shot at replacing fluxbox
MC although old, does things pretty well. One feature I really like is the ability to show two directories sidebyside so you can easily move files from one to the other. It also handles some archive files (can open/display them) just like WinExplorer. Pretty nice and functions in the console, which is a big plus. Open to discussion

On the total build size, I haven't really been worried about it. Instead I've been working towards the goal of filling all the functionality and using the least amount of space to do it. Think of it like a Packing Challenge. In this case, it's a matter of fitting the most functionality into the smallest possible space. In looking back through my old SysLogs where I recorded much of my build efforts (what I did, options I set along with Why), I saw that my last build used just less then 2GB of space. Of course that didn't include things like distfiles as I'm quite willing to delete them to save space when needed. In regards to /home - that's a different issue as my user files easily eat up 1.7 GB of space right now, so I know they wont fit. When I've finished this build, I'm hoping to meet or even exceed my functionality requirement for both off/on line use. That's my goal right now. Meet/Exceed the functionality requirements I've set in the smallest space possible and not use any tricks like a SquashFS to do so.

[FastTurtle]

I'm just about ready to shoot mom's computer because she asked me "how close to Windows can you get this?"

Well to answer that, I'm going to need suggestions for an email client that looks like Outlook Express/Live Mail as it's it's the one thing most of them wont give up and I've tried to get most of them to switch to Thunderbird in the past but get the same answer, I can't figure it out.

As to the other issues, if anyone knows of a webkit based browser that can be themed to look/feel like IE, that might be exactly what's needed to get them to move.

On the desktop front, it looks like I'll have to really look at LXDE to see just how close it can get. If it's able to match 95 percent of Win95 features, then it'll be close enough for jazz. Most of them have been using XP for so long that they've forgoten the many quirks of 95, so I can explain them that way. If they accept it, then I'm a damn happy camper.

I do hate to say it but it looks like Flash is going to be required. There's to much Facebook/YouTube and such that they're used to seeing/using.

[gorkypl]

[FastTurtle]

gorkypl:

I'm glad I caught this thread you posted in
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-914852-start-50-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-.html as it really broght something to light that I wasn't aware of being inactive with Linux for the last 5 years.

In regards to your questions, Balsa is about the closest to Outlook Express/LiveMail - Check Google's config instructions for screenshots of OE/LM

As to Firefox, since the users are resistant to change and all of them use IE, I'm pretty much forced to go with an IE Theme that functions/looks pretty much the same. If it doesn't they'll notice and wont use it or complain about the differences and not use the OS at all. All of them dislike Firefox and Safari isn't an option due to the many differences in how it does things. To them, Change is bad- damn the torpedos.

As to Flash, it's buggy, a resource hog, allows those annoying flash ads and a whole bunch of other problems. Personally I dislike it. Another and more important issue is that Adobe has decided in their great wisdom to no longer support flash on anything except the chrome browser due to HTML 5. This means that they wont be fixing any security/stability issues encountered with flash by year end, thus your flash will become a greater threat for various issues from stability to security. Do you really want that?

On the LXDE, I haven't really looked into it yet as it's new to me. The few screenshots I've seen do look pretty good so I have hope of finding a theme or being able to create one that functions very close to Win98 most times. If I do, then we're in good shape getting those Windows users to at least try it.

[gorkypl]