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Topic: Stripping DSL, as tiny as possible

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mikshaw

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: April 28 2006,04:42

I finally decided to go back to my old plan of turning Damn Small Linux into Wicked Small Linux, meaning make it as small as I can while still having what I'd consider the basics....the ability to edit text, run some core commands, expand the system through mydsl...blahblahblah. I'm keeping the X server, aterm and most of the lua scripts, and fluxbox is being replaced with the 23k evilwm. Just about every other gui app is going. That part I've mostly dealt with. I'm also getting rid of a lot of the stuff I'll never use in DSL...servers, vnc, rdesktop, samba, and a pile of miscellaneous applications that don't really serve much purpose in my world.

I've only gotten the KNOPPIX file down to 36mb, which is unacceptable. I had a prior version down to 27, and i want to go much further...hopefully closer to 20mb, or less, if possible. But there are several things I'm concerned about....

1) If I completely remove Perl, will that break any vital parts of the system? I know there are some Perl scripts here and there in DSL, but is there any Perl that is necessary to successfully boot, configure hardware, and add mydsl extensions? Perl is much too fat for me, and if i need it later there's myDSL.
2) I use Isolinux...does that mean i can delete /bin/syslinux?
3) Are the dpkg/debian files needed for anything other than installing deb packages? I use only mydsl, so dpkg isn't on my gottahaveit list.
4) What are these /usr/X11R6/bin/*make* programs? For tcc? can I kill 'em?
5) I recall reading something about remasters breaking the ability to install DSL to harddrive. Is this true? Not a big deal for me, but if it's true I can remove the install scripts.
6) There are font files everywhere...I'm afraid to remove/edit them. This isn't a question...I just don't look forward to trimming the fonts.
7) Icons are gone, so I may be modifying the mydsl scripts a little. Just letting you know.
8) I'm using a block size of 65536, according to meo's remaster tutorial. Since I have no idea what this means, would i get better results from a different size?

I'll probably have other questions and comments later...just thought I'd ask about these, since i'm kinda stuck at 36mb for now.

Thanks.

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roberts

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Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: April 28 2006,19:04

I would love to drop perl.
As I remeber perl is not necessary to boot system.
It is used in ndiswarpper, a bummer, and the latest ndiswarpper now uses even more perl modules. A bigger bummer.
Perl is used for the USB-ZIP pendrive install as well.
I am sure that there are others. But those two are enough to keep perl in.

mikshaw

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: April 28 2006,19:45

Thanks for that help.
I don't have wireless, so it's not important for now, but i was hoping to retain all of DSL's hardware support just for the sake of possible future use. I'm writing a shell script as I go so I can hopefully automate this process for future releases of DSL.
As for the USB-ZIP issue, I wonder if it can be modified to use Bash to accomplish what Perl currently does....I'll have to explore that a bit.

Anyway, after thinking about this for a while longer, I've decided to remove everything that I think I can do without, and then do a whole lot of testing to see what breaks. Your base for kernel 2.6 was even smaller than what I have now for 2.4, so I must be able to pull out plenty more without breaking everything. I didn't think that Kdrive was taking up very much space, but maybe that's a larger part of the system than I thought.

A lot of the fonts will have to go. Fonts are surprisingly large, and I personally don't use more than a few of them in DSL...fixed, helvetica (maybe it was verdana...i don't remember), lucidatypewriter, and maybe one or two of the bitstream fonts. Otherwise it's mostly artwiz and terminus, which I have in my home directory. I think it's going to be a pretty big task to remove them without breaking something, though.

My biggest problem is that there are so many files that are unknown to me, I need to research them all to find out if they are vital to basic linux tasks. But this microscopic DSL has been my desire ever since I learned about myDSL, so I'm gonna keep at it this time. Hopefully I'll be able to automate the process well enough that later DSL versions will need only minor tweaks. My current plan is to have everything I don't want automatically deleted through the use of a file list (this is what I'm working on right now), and have a separate directory for personal configs that will be copied into /etc/skel after removing all of the existing ones. The rest of the script will be for miscellaneous things like edits to various system files and building the KNOPPIX file & ISO.

Thanks again for your input.

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pr0f3550r

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Posted: April 29 2006,11:56

I don't think you can strip DSL further than this, yet retaining X.

I'd like a console only DSL with screen as window manager, lynx-ssl and I'd possibly keep Perl.

There is a nearly dead project called Salvare, a proper Debian derivative, only 32 MB.

One could build from that one, instead of Knoppix and add the DSL goodies (backup/restore, mydsl extensions and so on..)

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mikshaw

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Posted: April 29 2006,18:27

Quote (pr0f3550r @ April 29 2006,07:56)

I don't think you can strip DSL further than this, yet retaining X.

Kent and Chris stripped DSL 1.5 down to 25mb (KNOPPIX file only), and it has X, so i know it's possible to get it smaller than what I have. Even if i have to remove everything except hardware support and mountci, by golly it's gonna be 20mb or less =o)

Quote

There is a nearly dead project called Salvare, a proper Debian derivative, only 32 MB.

One could build from that one, instead of Knoppix and add the DSL goodies (backup/restore, mydsl extensions and so on..)

One could, but that would defeat the purpose of what I'm doing. I'm not trying to just make a tiny Linux distro....if I wanted to do that I'd start with a base Slackware or Debian net install, or ideally with Linux from Scratch. My goal is to see how small I can make DSL, and to automate the task so that I can easily apply the changes to future versions of DSL. The goal also includes an attempt to make my remaster as compatable with existing UCI packages as possible.

EDIT: removing Perl saves only a little over 1mb....much less than I had expected. I don't think losing ndiswrapper is worth that at this point, unless i can't get the size down significantly by going through the system file-by-file.
I know taking X out would shrink it, but that would be pointless in my opinion unless i or someone else were to make an X package in UCI format. Since I use X practically all the time, i don't think it would make much sense to have to load xfree86.dsl and suck up ram unnecessarily.

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4 replies since April 28 2006,04:42

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