Arch Linux

dslink

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2012-02-23

Posts: 48

Mini install iso?

I have always wondered why Arch has such a large installer image/iso when it pulls everything down from servers during install anyway. Does anyone know of a mini iso that will fit on something less than 700mb? Just odd Debian & Ubuntu both have mini installers around 30-100mb

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 11,539

Re: Mini install iso?

No.

700mb? You need to use a CD-R/CD-RW on a 64-bit system?

kermit63

Member

Registered: 2018-07-04

Posts: 173

Re: Mini install iso?

You can always try Netboot. It's less than 1 mb.
Or use GRUB's ISO boot capabilities.

Both alternatives allow you to bypass having to create an install medium.

Last edited by kermit63 (2020-08-04 15:31:20)

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Mini install iso?

I have always wondered why Arch has such a large installer image/iso when it pulls everything down from servers during install anyway. Does anyone know of a mini iso that will fit on something less than 700mb? Just odd Debian & Ubuntu both have mini installers around 30-100mb

Because Arch ships manpages, documentation, headers, i18n, every package is compiled with all the optional features included pulling in more dependencies if necessary, etc. This often takes up more space than expected. Check the sizes of /usr/include /usr/share/doc /usr/share/man

gcc-libs is 148.82 MB, most of which is the gcc-go and gcc-d (D lang) runtimes, 90 MB together. (Those really should be split packages but the maintainer doesn't want to.)

perl is 60 MB and should not be needed in minimal images, though man-db -> groff, and texinfo, both require it. Nevertheless, it's still installed due to one openssl legacy script. See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54887

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)

frostschutz

Member

Registered: 2013-11-15

Posts: 1,416

Re: Mini install iso?

You can always try Netboot. It's less than 1 mb.

That said, the less than 1M is merely a downloader. The actual Linux kernel and initrd image it downloads is considerably larger, around ~50M. And this in turn will then download a ~550M image file.

So you still download ~600M of data everytime you boot, before you even get to a shell. So, if you intend to boot this regularly, it's better to just use the ISO.

The booted live system (before doing anything) uses around ~1.5G of RAM since that's where all the downloads go.

So at minimum, 2GB of RAM required for this method (leaves you 512M RAM to work with, until you create a swap partition).

Another approach would be to install Arch from an existing Linux or any other Live CD you like.

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

For non-Arch Linux systems, that involves the downloading of a bootstrap image which is currently around ~160M. I think that's the smallest official image available for installing Arch as described in the wiki.

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Mini install iso?

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

You don't need the bootstrap image to run pacman, it's just the most convenient way.

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Managing AUR repos The Right Way -- aurpublish (now a standalone tool)