Arch Linux

Flippeh

Member

Registered: 2009-05-01

Posts: 3

[Space] How do the big ones do it?

I've been trying hard to get a lightweight, low footprint and very minimal Arch installation. Now, after I installed ALSA, Xorg, and Gnome, cleared the package cache, I ended up at 2.3 GiB of files in "/".
For comparism I just installed a Fedora Core 11 from a live disk, with Gnome, and I think there's much more "hidden" packages than I have, yet it's only 2.2 GiB.

I still wonder how distributions like Damn Small Linux go as low as 50 MB, while X is about 40 MB and the Kernel is surely over 10 MB, too

How low can I go?
What can I do to achieve my goal of lightweightness?
I don't fear of using advanced techniques, as long as there's good information about it, because I like to learn

whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Re: [Space] How do the big ones do it?

Forum search for "damn small linux" or "lightweight" already reveals a few topics an about every aspect of that question. And there might be more fitting or general terms to search for.

Allan

Pacman

From: Brisbane, AU

Registered: 2007-06-09

Posts: 11,384

Website

Re: [Space] How do the big ones do it?

Not that Fedora and others tend to plit out the headers and docs into separate packages so getting a "small" install will be more difficult in Arch as these are all packaged together.  Also, small does not equal lightweight.  Other distros might use less space, but start many more processes by default.

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casperh

Member

From: Aarhus, Denmark

Registered: 2009-02-13

Posts: 48

Re: [Space] How do the big ones do it?

Try something else than GNOME. Like LXDE, Openbox or something like that. GNOME uses 500-600~ MB in "/" where LXDE 15~ MB of space.

Peasantoid

Member

Registered: 2009-04-26

Posts: 928

Website

Re: [Space] How do the big ones do it?

Ewww, GNOME / DEs in general. If you care that much about minimalism, use a tiling WM or one of the *box family.

Ghost1227

Forum Fellow

From: Omaha, NE, USA

Registered: 2008-04-21

Posts: 1,422

Website

Re: [Space] How do the big ones do it?

Check out my Desktop Workshop

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tam1138

Member

Registered: 2007-09-10

Posts: 238

Re: [Space] How do the big ones do it?

"GNOME" and "lightweight" are mutually exclusive.

Crows

Member

From: Wales

Registered: 2008-09-05

Posts: 92

Re: [Space] How do the big ones do it?

while X is about 40 MB and the Kernel is surely over 10 MB, too

Well, you can change the compression used by the kernel to optimize for size over speed. Then there's the optional stuff within the kernel that can be stripped away for a highly-minimal base system.

I'm fairly certain that Arch ships more packages with X than the 'big names' (feel free to correct if I'm wrong here), which set the system up themselves and can skip anything they don't need (not to mention the huge number of patches a distro like Ubuntu adds to their system).

You can even use certain switches within GCC that compile for small sizes over raw speed.

Oh, and yeah, Damn Small wouldn't use Gnome .