Minimal installation

Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz at simpaticus.com
Tue Nov 11 16:34:14 UTC 2003


At 03:21 11/11/2003, you wrote:

>But yeah, ideally some-one should modify the package groups to exclude
>all the unnecessary bloat in the minimal installation.
>
>If some-one submitted a truly minimal kickstart configuration people
>could use this too. :) For until the packages are shifted out of the
>basic installation set.... :)

Join the "fedora-minimal" project here:

http://simpaticus.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-minimal_simpaticus.com

if you want to help. The "fedora-minimal" project will likely only take a 
few weeks to do what it needs and then stop. The basic objectives right now 
are the following:

         1. Start with a minimum install according to Anaconda.

         2. Pare down to the minimum PRACTICAL and USABLE system. This 
means leave a text editor, and iptables, and a tool to synchronize the 
machine's clock, for example, even though the system could boot without any 
of them, because I would NEVER install a system without them. Select always 
the smallest tool from Fedora Core packages that will do the job. The 
results of this effort are the "base" package group.

         3. Define a set of "upgrade" packages that replace base packages, 
taking up more space but adding much more functionality. For example, base 
includes nano as a text editor but "upgrades" offers vim-common/vim-minimal 
as an alternative, giving you a far better text editor and costing you 
11MB. Base also includes rdate to set the time (10K) but upgrades offers 
ntpd (2MB) as a more powerful option.

         4. Define a set of "optional" packages for convenience. These 
packages have nothing to do with the "smallest possible install", but 
rather are the packages necessary to do the job for which we wanted a small 
install in the first place, those packages which we want to have easily 
accessible. Included here are vsftpd, BIND (named), httpd, samba, dhcp, 
kickstart, etc.

         5. Create a kickstart file that installs only the base packages.

         6. Create a kickstart file that is easily customizable to install 
packages from the upgrades set.

         7. If the time and resources are available, create an ISO with all 
these packages and modify the installer to offer the packages in upgrades 
and optional during installation. At that point, individual users will be 
able to create their own kickstart files using any of the available packages.

Currently, the smallest install on my Fedora system is down around 310MB. 
Some more experimentation is going on, and since ours is a small list where 
improvements are made incrementally, someone just coming in would be 
well-advised to run through the archives and offer opinions on what we've 
done so far.

Once we're done, I will probably contribute our efforts to both the Fedora 
and RULE projects so that they can continue as they see fit. At this point, 
Fedora-minimal is intended to reach an objective and cease... it is not 
expected to be an ongoing effort (although who knows, I didn't expect to 
start this in the first place). Also, at this point we are using STRICTLY 
Fedora Core packages. Later on we may choose to substitute other packages, 
assuming that we can comply properly with Fedora guidelines for this (don't 
want to disturb any trademarks or rules).


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com





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