[CentOS] Minimal CentOS

Tue Oct 21 09:56:39 UTC 2008
Puneet Goel <puneet.maillist at gmail.com>

Hi! and a warm hello to the CentOS team.

I have a work for which I need some solution from you. Actually we
have some thin clients where we want to put a light weight Linux
distro for users. As of now I have tested with Fedora and Ubuntu
distros but the issue I am finding is they are not able to fit in my
requirement of flash based hard disk consumption (~500 MB). although a
distro named TinyME which is a custom version of PCLinuxOS seems to be
very near and with a little customization by putting XFCE it was
around 600MB. but it is not well known and supported.

I have also tried CentOS 5 and 4 (with bare minimum installation) but
it is coming little heavy, however later on I came across a link
(http://www.owlriver.com/tips/tiny-centos/) providing a kickstart file
for a bare minimum CentOS 4. It gave me CentOS 4 which ate around 400
MB. However it was little near to my specs but without a usable
Desktop (KDE and Gnome seems to be out of question because of heavy
size). Now I need some suggestions from you to make it work on my
system. I need a light version of CentOS (I am very much particular
about OS identity and the final product will retain the parent OS
identity and quality).  Can you provide me some kickstart file or
something else which can help me in making a final thing.  I do not
need eye candies/OpenOffice/Adobe flash/Games/Media Player etc. Just a
usable desktop, a lightweight file browser and desktop with icons (may
be XFE). Redundant locale, man, doc, /lib/modules etc. will be removed
as well.

Karan told me that he heard someone installing CentOS 5 in 500MB. Can
anyone point me in right direction. any kickstart file or iso will be
of great help.

At my personal end I would prefer to put CentOS (As it is based on
RHEL and has an excellent community around).  Looking forward to hear
from you.

Thanks and Regards,
Puneet