[CentOS] Minimal CentOS

Tue Oct 21 18:54:42 UTC 2008
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 5:56 AM, Puneet Goel <puneet.maillist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I think you are probably looking for something like 'Thinstation'.

With RHEL/CentOS being LAMP oriented, it will always pull in a lot more
then you really want.

Another option would be to have the OS run over the network by making
your stations use NFS mounts to mount a common OS tree that is
managed centrally.

You can look at the K12 LTSP project for that, they even have a CentOS
variety.

-Ross