Re: [gentoo-dev] install CD bloat

[Stuart Herbert]

On Monday 18 August 2003 8:42 pm, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> I've used the same installation CD for most of my gentoo installs over the
> past few months, so I was shocked today when I realized that the smallest
> install ISO that we currently offer (at least for x86) is 80MB.  When I
> started with Gentoo, it was ~15MB.

The current gentoo-basic iso is around 68 Mb; the uncompressed livecd image on 
there comes out at 144 Mb.  (Btw, why isn't there an ebuild for cloop 
anywhere in Portage?  No matter, I've put one together, which I'll commit 
later in the week.  Don't use cloop-1.0, as it's not compatible with cloop 
images made with older versions, because of the change to 64-bit in the file 
format, and because cloop-1.0-2 looks like it was released by accident)

It looks like adding vim to the iso is one of the causes of the size increase.  
So (it seems) is Perl 5.  Having vim is much appreciated (although a bit of 
trimming would be nice perhaps), but I'm not yet sure why the CD needs Perl 
5.  I'm sure it's been put on there for a reason tho.

I think a nice target size should be an image that fits onto your average 64Mb 
Pendrive.  Being able to carry a Gentoo install solution around on my keyring 
(along with my gpg keys :) sure is nice.  So ideally a 55Mb image, to allow 
room to spare.

It doesn't look too hard to make a smaller image if you want.  The syslinux 
site seems (I haven't tried this *yet*) to have all the info required on how 
to make a new ISO image, and it's easy enough to look at the contents of the 
existing ISO image, with a short amount of work.  I can knock up a mini-guide 
for that if there's demand.

Best regards,
Stu
-- 
Stuart Herbert                                              stuart@g.o
Gentoo Developer                                       http://www.gentoo.org/
Beta packages for download            http://dev.gentoo.org/~stuart/packages/
Come and meet me in March 2004                 http://www.phparch.com/cruise/

GnuGP key id# F9AFC57C available from http://pgp.mit.edu
Key fingerprint = 31FB 50D4 1F88 E227 F319  C549 0C2F 80BA F9AF C57C
--