Quoting Bards1888 bards1888@gmail.com:
Did you see my post from yesterday (titled 'Minimal Server Install') where Johnny Hughes said he managed to get Centos 4 down to 550mb ? Also, the tip from Ash Christopher to go here;
http://www.owlriver.com/tips/tiny-centos/
is fairly useful.
The "minimal install" issue was already beaten to death several times. The above link is usefull, but instead of excluding bunch of individual packages by hand, you can simply do:
%packages --nobase
That will elimiate the base group (which would otherwise be installed by default with all its insane dependencies). Actually, after you use --nobase option, you'll find yourself quickly adding packages back, instead of removing them ;-)
Some of the packages that are not installed with --nobase option, and that you might want to reinclude are: crontabs, iptables, logwatch, logrotate, man, man-pages, ntp, openssh-clients, openssh-server, sendmail, sendmail-cf, vixie-cron and yum. Anaconda will complain about 'system-config-mouse' missing at the end of postinstall, however you can safely ignore that (or simply add the package to be installed, if you don't like seeing Anaconda complaining).
See also https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139364
BTW, if you are installing on USB stick, note that each memory location on stick has limited number of writes (somewhere around 100k, if I remember correctly). Running OS with ext2/3 file system on it might burn some of them very fast. You would at least want to mount all filesystems with noatime option, use ext2 (no journaling, since journal will be written over and over again over same memory locations whenever there's some file system activity) and reconfigure syslog to send logs somewhere else (not write them to USB stick). I think there was an article in Linux Journal with some usefull recomendations how not tu burn your USB stick by installing OS onto it (but I can't find it right now, you might want to try searching www.linuxjournal.com).
How to install on USB stick... Hmmmm... When you boot into rescue mode (or from alt-2 console during install) and you execute "list-harddrives", do you see USB stick reported?
An workaround that might work would be installing on "real" hard drive, then copying everything to USB stick (create partitions and LVM volumes (if you use LVM)), remove hard drive, boot into rescue, mount file systems from stick, chroot into it, make appropriate changes to /etc/fstab, check grub/lilo config (whichever you use as boot loader), rebuild initrd image(s) in /boot directory, install grub or lilo into MBR. Should work. Basically, all the stpes if you were to restore machine from backup onto different hardware than original machine...
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