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Minimize Gentoo to fit in internal flash of SheevaPlug
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yesar
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PostPosted: Mon May 31, 2010 1:36 pm    Post subject: Minimize Gentoo to fit in internal flash of SheevaPlug Reply with quote

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.
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Telemin
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PostPosted: Mon May 31, 2010 1:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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
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PostPosted: Mon May 31, 2010 7:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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.
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Shining Arcanine
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 03, 2010 5:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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.
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yesar
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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 :D ) 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 :)
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