smallest possible arch installation

martinmartiini · 2011-09-29 13:18:18

installed tinycore linux on SD-card - installation size 20Mb (yes, twenty mb !!) (graphical desktop, apps, web)
what is smallest possible usb-stick Arch install?
Thanks

karol · 2011-09-29 13:21:37

Much bigger, because we use coreutils, not busybox.
I'm not sure if you get webapps (or any apps - apart from busybox and util-linux - for that matter ;P) in that 20 MB in tinycore though.
Tinycore version 4 gets you kernel (3.03), busybox, udev, eglibc, e2fsprogs, gcc-base, util-linux, and Xlibs.

Last edited by karol (2011-09-29 13:24:37)

Dieter@be · 2011-09-30 12:08:09

AFAIK installing only packages from base is the smallest supported installation.
you can of course go smaller then that if you tinker enough.

Gusar · 2011-09-30 12:20:57

You mean the full install is 20MB? Or the installation media, which is compressed? If it's the full install, whoa!

You can remove a lot from Arch post-install and still have a functional system. But you'll have to do such trimming every time you do an update. Because, for example, the Arch util-linux package will install everything util-linux has to offer and not just the parts that are strictly necessary. And even if you do such trimming, you won't get even close to 20MB. Arch is simply not built for that.

karol · 2011-09-30 12:29:59

Gusar wrote:

You mean the full install is 20MB? Or the installation media, which is compressed? If it's the full install, whoa!

The standard iso for the latest tinycore is just 12 MB.

Gusar · 2011-09-30 12:55:08

karol wrote:

The standard iso for the latest tinycore is just 12 MB.

Yeah, but that's compressed. And surely this decompresses to more than 20MB? Which browser is in there? And does X support more than vesa?

karol · 2011-09-30 13:05:52

Gusar wrote:

karol wrote:
The standard iso for the latest tinycore is just 12 MB.
Yeah, but that's compressed. And surely this decompresses to more than 20MB? Which browser is in there? And does X support more than vesa?

By default there's no web browser, you get kernel (3.03), busybox, udev, eglibc, e2fsprogs, gcc-base, util-linux, and Xlibs, as mentioned https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 84#p996584

I've never installed it and I have no idea how much space does it need for install.

broken pipe · 2011-09-30 14:58:58

i always start from a really stripped down system which is about 200mb big. the only thing you really need to install is the linux package (pacman and dhcpd are also recommendable ), because it draws all other needed dependencies. you'll also need a bootloader to boot the system.
+ removing locales gives you more free space

tinycore is quite nice but if you want to use your programms which are familiar, tinycore will also be bloated.

elliott · 2011-09-30 15:15:33

karol wrote:

Gusar wrote:
karol wrote:
The standard iso for the latest tinycore is just 12 MB.
Yeah, but that's compressed. And surely this decompresses to more than 20MB? Which browser is in there? And does X support more than vesa?
By default there's no web browser, you get kernel (3.03), busybox, udev, eglibc, e2fsprogs, gcc-base, util-linux, and Xlibs, as mentioned https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 84#p996584
I've never installed it and I have no idea how much space does it need for install.

The install media is the same as the installed system, if that makes any sense. All of that stuff is in the initramfs, it is extracted every boot, so that is all of the space you need for a basic install. You install software by mounting it as a loopback device, so it only takes up as much space as the package.

It is a very unique and interesting distribution, it definitely has some advantages. For one, if you set it up right and someone purposely or accidentally trashes the system, a restart is all that is needed to bring it back to normal.

I've crammed an amazing amount of functionality into a 128mb SD card before with TinyCore.

Last edited by elliott (2011-09-30 15:16:25)

karol · 2011-09-30 15:18:21

Removing docs and man pages further slims the default Arch install.

@elliott
Not sure what you mean by 'very unique' - slitaz works in a similar way. You need a liveCD / liveUSB system + some overlay fs for the changes you want to keep (persistent /home etc.).

Last edited by karol (2011-09-30 15:20:34)

elliott · 2011-09-30 15:26:31

karol wrote:

@elliott
Not sure what you mean by 'very unique' - slitaz works in a similar way. You need a liveCD / liveUSB system + some overlay fs for the changes you want to keep (persistent /home etc.).

Unique when compared to the mainstream distributions and their clones and derivatives. If you've only used normal distributions (yes, Arch would classify as normal) it will take some getting used to. It took a while for me to understand everything going on, remastering my own initramfs and making my own packages really helped me understand.

karol · 2011-09-30 15:33:21

elliott wrote:

karol wrote:
@elliott
Not sure what you mean by 'very unique' - slitaz works in a similar way. You need a liveCD / liveUSB system + some overlay fs for the changes you want to keep (persistent /home etc.).
Unique when compared to the mainstream distributions and their clones and derivatives. If you've only used normal distributions (yes, Arch would classify as normal) it will take some getting used to. It took a while for me to understand everything going on, remastering my own initramfs and making my own packages really helped me understand.

Ah, now I get it.
We do have archboot https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Archboot, but it's not the smallest system :-)

ANOKNUSA · 2011-09-30 16:08:42

karol wrote:

Removing docs and man pages further slims the default Arch install.

@elliott
Not sure what you mean by 'very unique' - slitaz works in a similar way. You need a liveCD / liveUSB system + some overlay fs for the changes you want to keep (persistent /home etc.).

You could add Puppy to that list. I haven't played around with it in quite some time, but the devs used to advertise a 64MB RAM cache to boot into a live environment, with either a tiny bit of hard drive space or a non-finalized CD for persistence. Installing it takes ~100MB of disk space, which includes utilities like Gparted, graphical wifi support, a graphical browser (uzbl, I think?), ROX file manager, etc.

Gusar · 2011-09-30 16:46:38

elliott wrote:

The install media is the same as the installed system, if that makes any sense. All of that stuff is in the initramfs, it is extracted every boot

Yeah, I figured that, it makes full sense, all live distros work similarly. Which means it's 20MB compressed, which isn't actually that impressive (I have a stripped down Arch which is 26.8MB compressed, about 90MB uncompressed, and provides a complete GTK environment, including gnome-mplayer, the Midori browser, and GParted).

The defining difference of TinyCore is the method to install new apps - by mounting filesystem images that contain the app.

elliott · 2011-09-30 18:43:37

Gusar wrote:

elliott wrote:
The install media is the same as the installed system, if that makes any sense. All of that stuff is in the initramfs, it is extracted every boot
Yeah, I figured that, it makes full sense, all live distros work similarly. Which means it's 20MB compressed, which isn't actually that impressive (I have a stripped down Arch which is 26.8MB compressed, about 90MB uncompressed, and provides a complete GTK environment, including gnome-mplayer, the Midori browser, and GParted).
The defining difference of TinyCore is the method to install new apps - by mounting filesystem images that contain the app.

From what I remember, it isn't that heavily compressed. I am running it now in a VM, df -h tells me rootfs has 15.9mb used. I think I remember a dev telling me they could possibly compress it a lot more, but didn't want to trade speed.

Gusar · 2011-09-30 19:27:24

elliott wrote:

From what I remember, it isn't that heavily compressed. I am running it now in a VM, df -h tells me rootfs has 15.9mb used. I think I remember a dev telling me they could possibly compress it a lot more, but didn't want to trade speed.

Well, what you also need to know is that only what's currently needed is decompressed. For example, in my case, libwebkit and Midori won't be decompressed until you actually launch Midori. I get the size/speed argument, I use an xz-compressed squashfs and launching apps does take a noticeable amount of time because of this.

But if TinyCore doesn't even have a browser (and probably missing a lot of other stuff too), it's small size isn't one bit surprising. The rules are very simple: Use busybox for as much as possible (busybox rocks!!). Use a compiler that produces small binaries (gcc-4.5 would be that, gcc-4.6 would not) and compile with -Os. Also, install from each package only what's absolutely necessary.

elliott · 2011-09-30 19:52:18

Gusar wrote:

elliott wrote:
From what I remember, it isn't that heavily compressed. I am running it now in a VM, df -h tells me rootfs has 15.9mb used. I think I remember a dev telling me they could possibly compress it a lot more, but didn't want to trade speed.
Well, what you also need to know is that only what's currently needed is decompressed. For example, in my case, libwebkit and Midori won't be decompressed until you actually launch Midori. I get the size/speed argument, I use an xz-compressed squashfs and launching apps does take a noticeable amount of time because of this.
But if TinyCore doesn't even have a browser (and probably missing a lot of other stuff too), it's small size isn't one bit surprising. The rules are very simple: Use busybox for as much as possible (busybox rocks!!). Use a compiler that produces small binaries (gcc-4.5 would be that, gcc-4.6 would not) and compile with -Os. Also, install from each package only what's absolutely necessary.

Sure, the size alone isn't terribly impressive when you break it down, but the fact that it is still a very capable and easily expanded distribution is impressive. It also has extensions that can be mounted on demand, so you're not waiting for them all to be mounted at boot time.

I do wish they had wireless and sound support in the base initramfs, which is why I remastered it, I added wireless, replaced flwm with Fluxbox and added OSS.

Gusar · 2011-09-30 20:20:49

elliott wrote:

but the fact that it is still a very capable and easily expanded distribution is impressive.

Definitely. It's really refreshing to see that Linux is still capable of something like that and that there are people willing to spend the time to produce such things, instead of going for, say, yet another Ubuntu derivative. It was not my intent to label TinyCore as something not impressive. It is definitely an inspiring little distro, to counterbalance the ever growing size of "mainstream" distros.

ninjaaron · 2011-09-30 20:42:14

It's kinda funny that someone in this thread called util-linux bloat... but I guess nobody really needs to, I dunno, do anything besides boot.

Gusar · 2011-09-30 20:52:09

ninjaaron wrote:

It's kinda funny that someone in this thread called util-linux bloat... but I guess nobody really needs to, I dunno, do anything besides boot.

I'm the only one who mentioned util-linux, but I don't see where I called it "bloat". But let me clarify: From the whole bunch of utils that come with the package, you only really need a few. So you can trim an installation by keeping only those instead of the entire util-linux package.

However, there's also this: Some of those utils can be replaced with busybox. And compared to busybox, util-linux and coreutils (and others) actually are "bloat".

Last edited by Gusar (2011-09-30 20:54:04)

ninjaaron · 2011-09-30 21:34:34

I was referring to this post:

broken pipe wrote:

i always start from a really stripped down system which is about 200mb big. the only thing you really need to install is the linux package (pacman and dhcpd are also recommendable ), because it draws all other needed dependencies. you'll also need a bootloader to boot the system.
+ removing locales gives you more free space
tinycore is quite nice but if you want to use your programms which are familiar, tinycore will also be bloated.

izobretenik · 2011-10-01 14:50:44

Could you please give me some tips here on what can safety be removed on installation?

bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=127321

Last edited by izobretenik (2011-10-01 14:51:31)

FTian · 2011-10-21 22:19:56

In debian , there is a tool named debootstrap , you can install debian in a existing unix/linux system , is there a similiar tool in Arch ?

karol · 2011-10-21 22:21:29

FTian wrote:

In debian , there is a tool named debootstrap , you can install debian in a existing unix/linux system , is there a similiar tool in Arch ?

There is https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fa … nux_System but I'm not sure if that's what you want.

bohoomil · 2011-10-21 22:25:24

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/In … ting_Linux

OK, karol was first (again?)

Last edited by bohoomil (2011-10-21 22:26:33)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-09-29 13:18:18

smallest possible arch installation

#2 2011-09-29 13:21:37

Re: smallest possible arch installation

#3 2011-09-30 12:08:09

Re: smallest possible arch installation

#4 2011-09-30 12:20:57

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#5 2011-09-30 12:29:59

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#6 2011-09-30 12:55:08

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#7 2011-09-30 13:05:52

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#8 2011-09-30 14:58:58

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#9 2011-09-30 15:15:33

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#10 2011-09-30 15:18:21

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#11 2011-09-30 15:26:31

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#12 2011-09-30 15:33:21

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#13 2011-09-30 16:08:42

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#14 2011-09-30 16:46:38

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#15 2011-09-30 18:43:37

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#16 2011-09-30 19:27:24

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#17 2011-09-30 19:52:18

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#18 2011-09-30 20:20:49

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#21 2011-09-30 21:34:34

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#22 2011-10-01 14:50:44

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#23 2011-10-21 22:19:56

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