Netbook gotchas?

[Patrick Bartek]

--- On Wed, 6/8/11, Beartooth <beartooth at comcast.net> wrote:

>     I've been running Omega Linux 14 (respin
> of F 14) on an EeePC 
> 701, with an 8GB camera card in the slot. I'm very pleased
> with the OS 
> (Rahul, I owe you big time!); but the hardware just doesn't
> fit my extra 
> large trifocal fingers and arthritic eyeballs. (I've
> replaced it with a 
> Starling 10" from System76, running plain F14.)
> 
>     My wife, who has small hands and better
> eyesight, naturally gets 
> first refusal of the EeePC; I think she'll like it even
> more than I, and 
> keep it for years. (At our age, we spend a lot of time in
> medical waiting 
> rooms, which are starting to have wifi, but still have
> dismal 
> magazines.The EeePC is little more trouble than a book.)
> 
>     If she keeps it, I'll leave my own
> userid on it, to make 
> troubleshooting more convenient; but my files are taking up
> most of the 
> space available, and need to be devastated, wholesale.
> 
>     I'll start with text files and folders
> full of pix to use as 
> desktop backgrounds; no sweat there. But what else?
> 
>     Any thoughts on what's safe to remove --
> such as *all* tarballs 
> and rpm's downloaded by me (rather than by yum or
> PackageKit)? 
> 
>     And most of all, are there any gotchas
> to be leery of? (I do know 
> better than to delete my .addressbook or my .pinerc.)

Here's what I did to reduce a Linux install about 1.5 GB.  It was on a EeePC 900 with 4GB and 16GB SSDs.  The OS (Eeebuntu 3.0 Standard, GNOME, 1GB RAM) was a stock install on the 4GB drive (/home and swap were on the 16GB one) and took 3.2GB leaving only 700MB.  I was able to easily reduce the OS to 2.1GB including what additional apps I installed later by removing the following using Eeebuntu's package manager.  So, it should work the same with Fedora.  Printer drivers, except ones needed; Locales and language files, fonts, apps, servers (DNS, Apache, etc.), and utilities not needed.  Man and Info pages.  Other documentation.  Backgrounds, themes, etc. not needed.  I installed BusyBox and removed the corresponding Linux system commands that weren't needed.  Plus, a few other small things for personal reasons.  As in I never used this or that.  So, why keep it.

That's pretty much it.  Just remove one thing or group of things at a time, checking if there will be dependency issues.  Of course, back up, Back Up, BACK UP!

B