Arch Linux

lostinpurdy

Member

Registered: 2010-05-02

Posts: 12

minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

Hi, I have an old laptop that I want to put to good use for basic stuff such as web browsing, write documents, playing media. The disk space is very small, 7G at most and I'd like to have plenty space for personal files and downloads. I know that the regular base install takes up something like 300 mb. So what can I do to get it down to say 100 mb or even less than that (includes some minimal desktop)? Which of the base packages can I safely drop for a working xorg-less system with a minimal desktop going? I learned from somewhere else that I could drop kernel26, which is 80-something megs huge. Would I still be able to run a desktop without that?
Any syggestion?

litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

I would say there are better alternatives for creating a (really) minimal installation on old hardware, have you considered Damn Small Linux?

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lostinpurdy

Member

Registered: 2010-05-02

Posts: 12

Re: minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

Yeah, DSL is nice too but I really like to stick to arch for I prefer to make it my way over having a pre-configured distro environment imposed upon me leaving me to replace/remove the DE/WM and programs that I don't like to have. Plus I kind of made it my challange to get my arch install as small as possible while at the same time preserve most of it's functionality as a desktop workstation. Plus I don't want to give up pacman.

Also: I originally just want to find out it that has been accomplished at all (100mb or less)

Last edited by lostinpurdy (2010-09-02 08:37:33)

flamelab

Member

From: Athens, Hellas (Greece)

Registered: 2007-12-26

Posts: 2,160

Re: minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

Try Slitaz, it's *very* good for such a small distro, and has a sufficient package manager.

lostinpurdy

Member

Registered: 2010-05-02

Posts: 12

Re: minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

Ok, so Slitaz gets down to 30MB, Tiny goes to 10MB both with a desktop and some extra programs.. and there are some console based distros that fit on a floppy disk, so.. how comes the Arch base install is so HUGE?? How do they do that? How do they get them so small??

Last edited by lostinpurdy (2010-09-02 09:46:43)

Pierre

Developer

From: Bonn

Registered: 2004-07-05

Posts: 1,964

Website

Re: minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

They probably strip out headers and documentation. If you need to care about a few MBytes Arch is probably not the right choice.

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karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

What I would call a small Arch installation is about 1.5-2 GB.
Also, I think your title is a bit misleading, as you want '<100 mb' not '> 100 mb'.

+1 for Slitaz / Tiny Core. They *are* configurable, they both have package managers, you can remaster them, (create your own 'flavour' as Slitaz folks say.
Most archers have developement tools installed and we use coreutils. Tiny distros use busybox. If they have a C compiler, it's most likely tcc. We use full-blown xorg-server, they use Xvesa or some smaller version of X server.

lostinpurdy

Member

Registered: 2010-05-02

Posts: 12

Re: minimal (with desktop) installation >100 mb possible?

oops didn't notice that hehe how did that happen? Anyways thanks for all your suggestions, I'm definately gonna have a look at slitaz and tinycore/tinyme.