Arch Linux

mos6502

Member

Registered: 2019-06-10

Posts: 1

Need Advice: Installing Arch on a Very Tiny Netbook

Hello,

I've been using Arch for a while now on both x86_64 and ARM. I have a handful of early netbooks floating around that still work. Some are i686, some are 64 bit Atoms, and some are ARM. Many will take a standard Arch install for their respective architecture, some probably won't without a lot of coaxing.

The most resource constrained of these systems have only 1GB SSD on-board with 512MB RAM shared with the graphics chip set. If you're thinking "EEE PC" or "OLPC Laptop" you're not far wrong. They all have MicroSD card slots. So, yes, if I wanted to install Arch I *could* just make the the SSD /boot and the SD Card /, /home, and swap. I'd actually like to figure out a way to shrink Arch to something under 1GB with some room to spare.

Is this doable with the standard installation ISO?

If it's not doable with the standard installer, what would it take to build a very minimal Arch from scratch -- just enough to boot, get on the wire / wifi, and install packages with pacman? What would I have to understand about Arch's build system, etc?

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 29,534

Website

Re: Need Advice: Installing Arch on a Very Tiny Netbook

A base install of arch linux is certainly over 1GB.  Arch is far from small.  You should look to distros made with low resources and small storage in mind.  I used to favor Slitaz for these goals, but now I'd probably look to Alpine.  The latter is fairly "arch-like" in it's approach with the exception of having lean packages (Arch tends to enable every optional configuration for packages).

Last edited by Trilby (2019-06-10 01:27:06)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman