How to trim fat off a very fat-free distro (GentooLITE?)

[hazza]

Hi,

First a little background (I'll try and keep it short!): I've been using Gentoo for about six months now and I'm more than happy with the way it behaves, operates and is generally as robust as any of the more well known Distros. With the exception of using RedmondWare for checking compatibility with web site designs, I use Gentoo as my primary OS.

However, I'm looking at building a (semi-)embedded system to live in my new car. Its all being done for educational purposes (read "a bit of a laugh") and, after having used Gentoo, I'm damned if I'm going to be forced back into using something like RedHat 7.2 simply because I don't have to install all of the developer tools.

So, the problem: I need to be able - once everything has been set up - to strip the machine of its development packages, spurious libraries and >>GASP<< portage / python etc. as once the machine's in place, it won't need any of these toys and, more to the point, it needs to fit on to a compact flash card!

Before I start decimating various installs, I was wondering if anyone else had attempted anything similar and to what degree of success? I'm going to be using VMWare to run the system initially so I can build and install, then copy the virtual disk files and then tear the guts out, hence allowing me to always add bits by using the "master" image.

Once how to unmerge the development / portage subsystems has been defined, it strikes me that you'd have a very configurable, versatile base on which to build semi-embedded systems...

If anyone has their two cents, they'd be great to hear

ATB,
Harry

[ctford0]

if you dont care about anything but booting the system, just delete the gcc dir... del the portage dir....

with *nix, you dont have to worry about uninstall something, just delete it.

As far as I can see if you leave the basic things that the system needs to run you should be fine.

Chris

[El_Presidente_Pufferfish]

go through the base system profile (what you get when you emerge system) and you can trim programs
i think its in /etc/profile/packages

you can also delete the /usr/src/linux/ directory if you dont plan on compiling anything against the kernel headers

[krinkle]

could just be talking out my ass, but maybe could you use distcc or something similar and do all the compiling on a seperate computer with all the developer libraries installed and then just copy the binaries on the small machine? that way you would optimize for the computers architecture, get faster compile times, and not waste space. I've been thinking of making a carputer myself (based on a via c3 most likely), and that was the route i was looking at... let me know how it turns out

[id10t]

Right tool for the job - and as much as i hate to say it, in this case Gentoo is not quite the right tool. For the minimal systems I've done, I just use whatver version of Slack I can lay my hands on (I have all of them from 7.0 up laying around in stratiegic locations) and install all of the A, AP, and N disk sets. When I did my dumb X terminal project a few months ago, I added the X (but not XAP) directory.
_________________
---
this space for rent

[mlynx]

Another thing to consider would be the flags you choose when installing the system. Make sure that USE flags are in order and remember that while a -O3 can really increase performance, -Os produces much smaller binaries.

I would also look at some of the smaller disk based distros for ideas on what to include, the bootable business card distros come to mind with (IIRC) about 50M in size.
_________________
mlynx
-------------------------
Did your mom -Os your brain when you were a baby?

[rac]

[krinkle]

[hazza]

[fidzysss]

You could also take a look at