[CentOS] Smallest install?

Mon Jul 5 23:13:33 UTC 2010
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Mon, Jul 05, 2010 at 06:33:57PM -0400, R P Herrold wrote:
> There are lower thresholds one cannot go below and still stay 
> wih current updates.  My article on 'tiny centos' provides 
> 'slimming scripts' to trim away coherent sets to taste 
> while still satisfying dependencies
>  	http://www.owlriver.com/tips/tiny-centos/

Hmm.  If I'm reading the script correctly then the trouble with that
is that it needs more space initially before it removes the unnecessary
stuff.

Also your 4.4 build is larger than an anaconda created 5.0..

I've built smaller configs for my user-mode-linux setup, but
these don't necessarily have dependency tree completeness :-)

   $ cat /etc/redhat-release
   CentOS release 5.4 (Final)
   $ df -h
   Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
   /dev/ubda             436M  313M  124M  72% /
   tmpfs                  16M     0   16M   0% /tmp

Of course there's no kernel, no boot loader etc.  It _does_ work
yum, so I can upgrade with 'yum update'.

> But to me, the question really is -- Is CentOS the right 
> distribution for this? -- a minimal Debian Testing install can 
> be made much smaller.  Just because one is familiar with 
> hammers does not mean one should be shaving cats with one

There's a few reasons:
  1) Can I?  The challenge :-)
  2) Familiarity
  3) No need to keep tracking and patching a different OS build

But #1 is the main reason :-)

-- 

rgds
Stephen