How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

sunliwei · 2009-10-19 16:03:54

Hi, I am trying to figure out all the package dependencies and trying to make a simple enough archlinux with desktop(no big things like GNOME or KDE, mybe LXDE or Openbox). I don't need any security things like PAM or acl+attr things , just keep it as simple-and-small as it could. The ultimate goal is trying to get a linux with networking and is capable to playing video. Is it possible to do so? I am trying hard to reduce the size of the whole system down to 512MB, and if it is not possible, 1GB is also acceptable.

Did anyone ever do such things before? Please , I really need some advice.

My machine is an Atom CPU based machine(Intel 945G) which only have 512MB SSD disk( or 1GB) with 512 RAM

Last edited by sunliwei (2009-10-20 09:58:45)

esters · 2009-10-19 16:16:01

Try Slackware.

MadTux · 2009-10-19 16:28:21

I may understand your question wrong, but why don't you try a pure Arch installation and then subsequently add things as you need them? That should be at least below the 1G mark. I think what makes an installation big are the apps you add, not the basic operating system.

sunliwei · 2009-10-19 16:33:45

anyting can be done with archlinux, I've tried a lot of linux distro these days, kind of tied of trying another one ....

sunliwei · 2009-10-19 16:39:56

MadTux wrote:

I may understand your question wrong, but why don't you try a pure Arch installation and then subsequently add things as you need them? That should be at least below the 1G mark. I think what makes an installation big are the apps you add, not the basic operating system.

My purpose is let the system run on an Atom CPU based machine(Intel 945G) which only have 512MB SSD disk( or 1GB) with 512 RAM. I also have to consider the swap partition may occupied some space( maybe 100MB swap space).

sunliwei · 2009-10-19 16:47:40

esters wrote:

Try Slackware.

I've tried several minimal linux like DSL, knoppix. The problem is my machine has a built-in Intel GMA 950 GPU. I have to use xorg-intel-video-driver >= 2.7 to make the dual screen works well. Some linux distro do not have the latest video driver.

Last edited by sunliwei (2009-10-19 16:48:04)

raul_nds · 2009-10-19 16:50:41

sunliwei wrote:

esters wrote:
Try Slackware.
I've tried several minimal linux like DSL, knoppix. The problem is my machine has a built-in Intel GMA 950 GPU. I have to use xorg-intel-video-driver >= 2.7 to make the dual screen works well. Some linux distro do not have the latest video driver.

What about Crux?

keenerd · 2009-10-19 16:54:53

Trial and error. Lots of experimentation. For a few months I used a 1GB drive. I think I went with all command line apps except for Midori and Gnumeric.

pacgraph was pretty much designed for this task. Here are the two most useful modes for you:

pacgraph --console

This will count up the total size of the installed packages. Then it will rank each top level package according to size. The size indicates the space freed by "pacman -Rssc packagename", letting you quickly cut out the bloat.

pacgraph --console -m arch-repo package1 package2 package3 ...

This will let you build a hypothetical Arch install. Any packages you list will have all dependencies automatically included, and it will tell you the total install size. This is only aware of official packages, so it may miss any gems in the AUR.

For example, my old system with X11, Midori and Gnumeric:
> pacgraph --console -m arch-repo xorg-server midori gnumeric
Total size: 544MB
34MB gnumeric
9972kB xorg-server
2136kB midori

Notice how the numbers don't quite add up? The difference is due to 498 MB of shared dependencies. This is a good thing, as you'll want as much overlap as possible.

Also, if you are running off of an SSD, don't waste space on swap. I have not used swap on any of my laptops in four years. You have more than enough ram and you will not need swap. (Please don't open a hundred tabs in your browser, though.)

Last edited by keenerd (2009-10-19 17:02:15)

sunliwei · 2009-10-19 16:56:40

raul_nds wrote:

sunliwei wrote:
esters wrote:
Try Slackware.
I've tried several minimal linux like DSL, knoppix. The problem is my machine has a built-in Intel GMA 950 GPU. I have to use xorg-intel-video-driver >= 2.7 to make the dual screen works well. Some linux distro do not have the latest video driver.
What about Crux?

But Crux is like Arch. My problem is I don't have much time to figure out all the package dependencies( I hate my boss , by the way). If I have time, I can spend a week ( or less) to use Linux From Scratch build my own system.

MadTux · 2009-10-19 17:14:18

Have you already thought about SliTaz? ISO is about 30MB, installed size about 80MB. Quick check showed that they have Xorg server Intel driver 2.7.0 (http://pkgs.slitaz.org/search.cgi).

bender02 · 2009-10-19 17:16:41

Arch will do the dependencies for you. Just install the base and carefully choose the top-level packages (eg what keenerd suggested), install them via pacman. It pulls the dependencies and nothing more.

sunliwei · 2009-10-19 17:45:43

MadTux wrote:

Have you already thought about SliTaz? ISO is about 30MB, installed size about 80MB. Quick check showed that they have Xorg server Intel driver 2.7.0 (http://pkgs.slitaz.org/search.cgi).

Slitaz seems lacking media player like MPlayer or VLC. Do you have a guide to install these packages on Slitaz?

gog · 2009-10-19 19:24:57

I did this, just not to the extent of skipping PAM.

My advice is to read LFS, install a core archlinux setup and modify as suited. I find it's less work than LFS (why do it in the first place since I'm gonna end up using pacman...) and slackware's lack of dependancy checking.

You have a point though, there are a lot of packages that could be split and trimmed. Take mplayer for example; it could be mplayer and mencoder as separate packages. There are more people interested in just playing music than there are interested in encoding it/doing both. A bunch of little other things like JACK dependancies, libcaca, but that's the main one.

I'm not encouraging whining, however. Just recompile the packages, man.

Last edited by gog (2009-10-19 19:25:56)

MadTux · 2009-10-20 06:43:43

sunliwei wrote:

MadTux wrote:
Have you already thought about SliTaz? ISO is about 30MB, installed size about 80MB. Quick check showed that they have Xorg server Intel driver 2.7.0 (http://pkgs.slitaz.org/search.cgi).
Slitaz seems lacking media player like MPlayer or VLC. Do you have a guide to install these packages on Slitaz?

They have MPlayer (http://pkgs.slitaz.org/cooking/multimedia.html#mplayer) and VLC (http://pkgs.slitaz.org/cooking/multimedia.html#vlc) and SliTaz has a package management system (http://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/manuals/tazpkg.en.html), so installation shouldn't be that difficult.

aditya.shevade · 2009-10-20 07:56:47

SliTaZ seems to be your best bet.

Mikko777 · 2009-10-20 08:46:49

Theres also tiny core linux:

Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux GUI Desktop. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk. The core runs entirely in ram and boots very quickly. Also offered is Micro Core a 6 MB image that is the console based engine of Tiny Core.
Our goal is the creation of a nomadic ultra small desktop capable of booting from cdrom, pendrive, or frugally from a hard drive. The desktop boots extremely fast and is able to support additional applications and hardware of the users choice.

http://www.tinycorelinux.com

sunliwei · 2009-10-20 09:59:20

Mikko777 wrote:

Theres also tiny core linux:
Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux GUI Desktop. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk. The core runs entirely in ram and boots very quickly. Also offered is Micro Core a 6 MB image that is the console based engine of Tiny Core.
Our goal is the creation of a nomadic ultra small desktop capable of booting from cdrom, pendrive, or frugally from a hard drive. The desktop boots extremely fast and is able to support additional applications and hardware of the users choice.
http://www.tinycorelinux.com

I tried tinycore, it seems doesn't have intel video driver >=2.7

sunliwei · 2009-10-20 10:04:07

aditya.shevade wrote:

SliTaZ seems to be your best bet.

It's full of french text. How about the i18n support? I need UTF-8

Last edited by sunliwei (2009-10-20 10:04:39)

sunliwei · 2009-10-20 16:13:51

I am trying the way keenerd advised. My work is still undergoing. But I think I will get my 1GB system. Thank you all. I love Arch! My Next goal is 512MB, hard work ...

pseudonomous · 2009-10-20 18:12:54

While I should suspect that you will have little difficulty accomplishing your goal of installing a 512 MB arch system, have you considered that you could attach external drives? I mean you could definately use external hard-drives for storing any personal documents you have, but you can also do anything from using an external hard-drive as "/usr" or swap space to just installing your entire OS onto an external disk (of course, doing something like this will make you dependant on having that external disk whenever you want to use your computer). Just thought I'd mention it.

Misfit138 · 2009-10-20 18:30:00

I ran a ~1gig Arch system on a 4GB hdd a few years back. Was fun, and not very difficult to get in under 1 gig. I deselected unneeded stuff from the base category, and went from there.

aditya.shevade · 2009-10-21 11:15:08

sunliwei wrote:

aditya.shevade wrote:
SliTaZ seems to be your best bet.
It's full of french text. How about the i18n support? I need UTF-8

You can chose language at boot. Though there are a few places where you see French language persisting. It's a minor issue though once you select English and US keymap at boot.

godane · 2009-10-21 16:28:47

@sunliwei

You could try out my livecd on my blog. Its under 700mb and it has a lot programs since i use squashfs+lzma 3.4 to make it all fit on to a CD. Xfce is the default desktop but you can change it at the slim login.

Mr.Elendig · 2009-10-21 21:57:04

Rebuilding everything, splitting out -dev and -doc stuff would probably help quite a bit on the disc space used too. And maybe using uclibc.

Last edited by Mr.Elendig (2009-10-21 21:57:42)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-19 16:03:54

How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#2 2009-10-19 16:16:01

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#3 2009-10-19 16:28:21

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#4 2009-10-19 16:33:45

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#5 2009-10-19 16:39:56

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#6 2009-10-19 16:47:40

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#7 2009-10-19 16:50:41

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#8 2009-10-19 16:54:53

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#9 2009-10-19 16:56:40

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#10 2009-10-19 17:14:18

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#11 2009-10-19 17:16:41

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#12 2009-10-19 17:45:43

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#13 2009-10-19 19:24:57

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#14 2009-10-20 06:43:43

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#15 2009-10-20 07:56:47

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#16 2009-10-20 08:46:49

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#17 2009-10-20 09:59:20

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#18 2009-10-20 10:04:07

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#19 2009-10-20 16:13:51

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

#20 2009-10-20 18:12:54

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#21 2009-10-20 18:30:00

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#22 2009-10-21 11:15:08

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#23 2009-10-21 16:28:47

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#24 2009-10-21 21:57:04

Re: How to build a minimal archlinux desktop?

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