[plug] Small Gentoo Installation

[W.Kenworthy]

There are numerous guides for gentoo to do this on the net, some get
down to small 50Mb setups for USB keys and the like - a quick search
should discover them.

In the meantime, 

rm -rfv /var/tmp/portage/* /usr/portage/distfiles
unmerge then delete the kernel build (after keeping the .config)
monolithic kernel (dont use genkernel!)


Innnovative things:
put the whole package management system on an NFS share so it is stored
elsewhere, or Put the packagemanagement system in a loopback mounted
file, kept elsewhere until needed.
Set the filesystem to use atime (I think).  Use it for a month and
delete evrything that hasnt been touched.  Run it for another month,
putting back what you overdid the first time!  Apparently you can really
get down small this way!

BillK


On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 11:31 +0800, Patrick Coleman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm trying to get a basic Gentoo installation down nice and small so I
> can tar it up and use it for VPSs. I know with Debian I can get an
> install of 300MB or so out of the box; Slackware seems to be about
> ~180MB, but the smallest I've been able to get gentoo is 1040MB which
> seems fairly large. I'm a Debian person - the concept of waiting hours
> to upgrade or install is new to me - so I've most likely missed
> something obvious here :)
> 
> All I'm looking for in software is whatever is required to make the
> system boot, plus dhcpcd, filesystem tools and vim. As far as I know
> this is all I've installed. The system I've made in a chroot from
> stage3 and portage tarballs; I've run
> /usr/portage/scripts/bootstrap.sh and emerge -e system. I have
> confirmed the system will boot in a VPS.
> 
> I've cleaned out /usr/portage/distfiles, /tmp and /var/tmp which
> dropped the size down to what it is now from about 1.4GB.
> 
> Heres the cd /; du -sh * output:
> 6.6M    bin
> 5.2M    boot
> 121K    dev
> 1.6M    etc
> 0       home
> 6.2M    lib
> 0       mnt
> 0       opt
> 0       proc
> 16K     root
> 6.0M    sbin
> 0       sys
> 0       tmp
> 881M    usr
> 114M    var
> 
> and /usr:
> 18M     bin
> 2.4M    i386-pc-linux-gnu
> 14M     include
> 196M    lib
> 11M     libexec
> 0       local
> 515M    portage
> 1.7M    sbin
> 126M    share
> 0       src
> 0       tmp
> 
> Any advice would be great.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Patrick
> --
> http://www.labyrinthdata.net.au
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