Making space on an EeePC

Patrick Bartek bartek047 at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 19 01:05:24 UTC 2010


--- On Thu, 11/18/10, Steven I Usdansky <usdanskys at rocketmail.com> wrote:


> > It's not at all clear to me how one would go about
> installing f13 or  f14
> > (or anything else similarly-sized) on a 4 gig device.
> You may have  better
> > luck if you can stick an 8 gig (or bigger) SDHC card
> in the SDHC  card
> > reader, install /boot on the internal 4 gigs and then
> let / and  /home
> > spill over onto it.
> > 
> 
> Been there, done that, here's how (more or less):
> 1. Install to a spacious partition on a similar system
> 2. Shrink partition containing the unstall to <4GB using
> gparted
> 3. Archive the filesystem (I use fsarchiver)
> 4. Format 4GB device (one ext2 partition)
> 5. Unarchive the archived filesystem to the 4GB device
> 6. Grow fs on 4GB device to fill the device
> 6. Install grub on 4GB device
> 7. Clean up mount point refs as needed
> 8. Reboot system from 4GB device

In those situations where drive space is tight (and/or RAM limited), I prefer doing a "base" install or whatever the distro offers as a option to the standard install.  No X.  No GUI.  Etc.  This usually takes the smallest amount of space possible--most time a few hundred megs--and doesn't require another computer.  Then use the command line package utility to remove what I don't need, and build the system I do, one piece at a time.

Using the above technique, I've obtained systems with GUI and all the bells and whistles I want in half the space (or less) of a default install, usually 1.2 to 1.5 GB, without much effort.  Besides the space savings, the systems seem to run faster and smoother, and use less RAM.

With today's distros being more potpourri than OS with a few basic utilities to get you started, I'm looking at the above technique for my next "normal" install just so there's no crab grass to begin with. ;-)

B


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