Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo

[Neil Bothwick]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:32:18 +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:

> 1. symlinks aren't (or at least weren't in my case) picked up by the
> process, probably because when you access a symlink, only the date of
> the target appears to be altered.  I had to manually copy many symlinks
> (which were mostly like /lib/libgcc_s.so -> libgcc_s.so.1) to even get
> the system to boot.  And the error messages threw me way off.

You could use find to copy all symlinks, then use the "symlinks -d -r /"
to remove all those that point nowhere.

> 3. don't delete everything you don't need, because you _will_ make a
> mistake.  In fact, we redid the entire process a few times from scratch,
> to refine it more.  To make it easier, make two partitions, or if your
> final copy will only have one disk and one partition, put in a spare
> disk just for the testing phase.  Make an exact copy on both before you
> start deleting.  Then you can keep going back to the full installation
> to get files you missed.  In fact, we made the machine dual boot to both
> disks, just in case we wanted to test the full install versus our
> minimal install.

Or you could start with an empty partition and use find to copy newer
files instead of deleting the older ones. One way would be to direct the
output of "find -newer /reference/file" to a file and use this as the
--files-from argument to rsync. 

> 4. write down the commands that you use to find and copy the files you
> want, that way the second and third and subsequent times you do it, you
> don't have to remember.

Or use a script, then you don't have to worry about losing the piece of
paper :) I run several commands from one line scripts, because means I can
be sure of using the same options each time.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Dyslexics of the world, untie!