Portage size on Netbooks

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2009 8:37 pm Post subject: Portage size on Netbooks

Well, I'm trying to install Gentoo on my eeePC (1.6GHz Atom N270). It came with a 4GB SSD.
Initially Xandros was on the machine. It kept on running out of disk space on upgrades => BAD.
I have eeebuntu on it currently. It works pretty well, and still has its own package manager, upgrades, and all.

But it's drawing off another archive and Ubuntu's support life is limited, and would like all my machines to be based off the same source.

I would like to get my eee to be self hosting (meaning, it can build itself). I'm trying to keep it in 4GB and still have 750MB or so to spare for general usage -- to be the same same as eeebuntu -- which so far seems somewhat difficult. Portage seems to be the biggest problem to have all of it installed on the eee.

Just wondering what others have done to keep disk consumption down. The CPU is not spectacular but should be able to do compile-upgrades (and it will have my other Gentoo machines to distcc from) -- which is why I'd like to keep portage with the machine. Distfiles will have to be kept clean of course.

I was thinking about a compressed FUSE filesystem but not sure of where to go from there...any dynamically resized compressed FUSE filesystem out there?

Currently I'm experimenting on an external mechanical HDD.to save some durability while I try to work a solution to squeezing it all on 4GB. I plan on trimming all the extra locales...wow that uses a lot of space... And see if I can reduce disk writes during normal use as much as possible...
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toralf · Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2009 8:47 pm Post subject:

Did you already read this http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Squashed_Portage_Tree ?

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Dec 14, 2009 9:53 pm Post subject:

Hmm... I never thought of using a squashfs+unionfs which is what that wiki appears to be doing, sounds like a good idea, thanks.

Anyone have comments about using this scheme? Might have to do this on my full size machines too...
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1191 Location: Austria

Portage supports compression - see PORTAGE_COMPRESS and PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS
That way you might even save some space without squashfs+unionfs.

Another idea would be mounting portage via network...

Rei
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djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

you could also compile on a different machine and just make packages, and install the packages on your eeepc
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eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 2:01 am Post subject:

dol-sen · Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2009 2:21 am Post subject:

At the cost of flash drives these days what about an 4 or 8gig usb flashdrive, they are cheap, not the fastest for writing, but to store the tree and such will read fast enough and leave more room on your ssd for compiling, etc..

They are really small plug in quick, easy to carry with the little netbook.
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