Small Hard Drive

ds123 · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 64

I'm trying to install Gentoo on a system with an old 2gig drive, and I got through the installation just fine. Then, when I did emerge sync, it ran out of disk space. I then checked my other Gentoo system and discovered that /usr/portage is pretty big.

What's the best strategy for running on a small drive? Yes, I know getting a bigger hard drive would fix this too.

This computer is going to be used as a router/firewall, so the functionality requred is pretty basic.

palmer · Guru Joined: 17 Nov 2004 Posts: 322 Location: Berkeley, CA

It is possible
I have a mail server (2 users), web server (hosting text), and rsync server on ~1.4gb (of an 8gb HDD)

It might not be what you want to hear, but you could but a USB HDD (if opening it up is the problem)
I am assuming that you want to put no money into this, though (just like I would)

If you have another computer, you could mount the portage tree over samba
Not sure if this would be secure though...
Also not sure if it's possible

Did you remove the files you downloaded when installing (the stages, and the portage tree)
They take up a few megs

Try pruning your system to the minimum possible
Remove unused programs
Is anything graphical installed? (They tend to be big, and unneeded for a server)
Remove extra kernel sources (in /usr/src/, all of them but what linux points to, and whatever you have compiled, and the newest)

You can safely delete (please wait for someone to confirm this)
/usr/portage/distfiles/*
/var/tmp/portage/*
/tmp/* <-- (I have mounted in RAM, so it's erased after every boot)
Make sure that nothing is going on (emerging stuff is stored in /var/tmp/portage)

gesiel · Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2005 4:43 am Post subject:

Hardware Requirements:
CPU..................486 or later
Memory..............64 MB
Diskspace...........1.5 GB (excluding swap space)
Swap space......At least 256 MB

Well,
2GB - 300MB (swap) = diskspace ok
CPU = ???
Memory = ???

try:
Partitioning Scheme:
/dev/hda1 1.7GB (for / , /boot and all outhers directories) ext3 or reiserfs
/dev/hda2 300MB (for swap)

delete all files in /usr/portage/distfiles
delete stage?*.tar.bz2
delete portage*.tar.bz2

drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1324 Location: London

/usr/portage over NFS works nicely

ds123 · n00b Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 64

Thank you for your messages. I tried removing distfiles, temp files etc, but couldn't seem to work it down very much.

I tried reinstalling again. I had used stage 3 the first time, so I tried stage 2, and emerge sync early in the process. Halfway through compilation of kernel and modules I ran out of disk space again. I then removed the distfiles, and got through it.

I'm currently at 87%, but as long as I do my logging to another system, I'm probably fine.

Thanks again.

gesiel · Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2005 1:00 am Post subject:

Great... good news...

good luck

Unther · Apprentice Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 163

A strategy I used when building a system on a 2GB device (memstick) was to reduce the block size of the file-system.