Hi Charles Chambers wrote: > Can anyone offer any advice on how to cut down the size of an autoinstall > DVD (CD)? > I have one stripped of most packages, with system utilities only, and the > image is still over 800MB.
If you can identify files which you will not need for booting or the installation, then xorriso may be used to create a new bootable ISO from the old bootable one without the unwanted files. See for an example https://wiki.debian.org/RepackBootableISO#In_xorriso_load_ISO_tree_and_write_modified_new_ISO Candidates for removal would be firmware files which you don't expect to need. (They appear twice in netinst ISOs but share content, so that removing only one of each pair will not free more than a few hundred bytes of directory size.) Rather unlikely with debian-cd or debian-live based ISOs: If you can identify files which you need for installation and which would shrink substantially by gzip-like compression, then xorriso could create a new bootable ISO with zisofs compression applied. This compression is supposed to be transparently inflatable by any Linux kernel (kernel configuration option CONFIG_ZISOFS is supposed to be default). Sparse example snippets are given in man xorriso under "Filters for data file content:". Look for "set_filter" and "zisofs". Ask me for tangible proposals when you can tell which files should be compressed. > I'd like to fit it onto a CD. Are there still working CD-only drives around ? (I still have two non-BD DVD drives which both are rarely powered on.) Debian netinst looks like it won't fit on CD with the next release. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/ Debian Live, too, bonks at the DVD size limit. https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-live-builds/amd64/iso-hybrid/ I expect both to be already heavily optimized for size. Have a nice day :) Thomas
