> What I need from FWLUG is: > 1. Advice. I know I can stuff a decent Ubuntu install into 1GB or less, > but it'll likely choke on even a minimal set of services.
That's only true if you're doing a full Ubuntu install. Essentially, forget about installing a gui. It can be done, but you'll get frustrated running anything more than FVWM. You might want to try Ubuntu server edition - it's headless. I haven't done enough Ubuntu installs to really give you much advice. A good option for a minimal install is definitely Suse ( http://www.opensuse.org/). 1) Extract all the ISOs and create an nfs volume for them on another computer 2) create a boot disk and boot laptop with it 3) during the process, you can decide what type of install you want to do (NFS, since you don't have a CD drive), it allows you to set up networking as part of the process and choose the NFS volume you want to mount for the install. Optionally (if you have FIOS), you could perform an install over FTP and use an external ftp server 4) choose "minimal install" (you might have to click and Advanced tab to see this option, it's been a while). This is really the bare essentials - you can then choose/search what packages you want to install in addition to the base install 5) don't go crazy on the partitioning, make sure you have swap. Other than that, I'd probably do a simple / partition since you don't have much disk space 6) go through the motions hint - if you pass vnc=1 in the params field when you start the install, you can set up VNC and you can even perform the install remotely from your workstation through the VNC client. Ironically, you can get a decent linux webserver up and running well under 300 MB disk space. I've always liked SUSE over Redhat b/c it gives you way more control over what you can and can't install. Yast (type yast at the command line) is also a really nice tool for configuring/managing your system. In additional software you want to install after installation - you'd do it through Yast. When you're up and running, you can type # chkconfig --list to see what is installed and running. I've done a couple of nifty things with SuSE that, at the time, wasn't able to do with Ubuntu, like install SUSE and the MBR on an external hard drive so essentially I have a portable, bootable, live distro that I could boot into from any computer that would allow boot over USB. The only difference is that it was on a hard drive and not a CD. -Dutch
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