On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Ira wrote:

At 01:36 AM 3/11/2007, you wrote:
My servers don't run anything more than they need to and don't have packages loaded that they don't need. I could rant on all day about the bloat I see in modern RH/Fedora/SuSe, even my favourite Debian systems, but this isn't the place ...

I'd love to have my box running that little, but how do I figure out what's not needed and how to get rid of it? One of my frustrations with the Linux world is the apparent assumption of people that their target audience already knows what they're talking about.

It's hard - unless you are a grumpy old man like me and have been "fiddling" with Unix/Linux for years and have the time & patience to prune stuff down.

The push right now for the major distros is to get "Linux on the Desktop" in a state as good as (or better!) than Windoze, so all sorts of "stuff" is included - printing programs, lots of eye candy, hot-plug drivers, sound drivers, and a whole host of other life-support code to keep the GUI going.

I'm willing to tolerate a lot loss that that, but newbies, or people who've previously been exposed to windows might not be.

You could simply start removing packages until it breaks :)
Or do a 'ps ax' and see what's actually running - work out if you need it, and remove it. Look in /etc/init.d and so on.

I create my flash boot systems the other awy round - I put on them just what I need - I am lazy though, so I have a bare-bones Debian box which is my development box. No X windows runs on it, I just ssh in from my main workstation. I then copy the whole of /bin /sbin and /lib to the flash device, then copy selected programs from /usr/bin. I've also worked out exactly which libraries I need from /usr/lib (using ldd on all the binaries!) remove any perl scripts in the process, make sure all executable files are stipped of their symbol tables and so on. This took time, and it's still a "work in progress"...

So I create my main flash drive, then I create a tar-file which contains /etc/asterisk, /var/www/bin and a few other selected files & folders. The system boots off flash, and early on gets this tar file off a separate partition on the flash device and installs it. This way I can update the system in 3 phases - kernel, (/boot/bzImage), main system (initrd.gz) or just the "software"...

Anyway, this is way off toppic :)

Gordon
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