* W.Kenworthy ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Gentoo is not designed to save space, or rather isnt worried about space > is a better way to describe it.
Well, I can understand this. With modern machines who exactly is using the kind of drive I am right now? Yesterday in the local Circuit City I noticed that you cannot even buy a 40 gig drive anymore. Just too small I guess. Just like the installation itself. Now just everybody it seems has a broadband connection and so that is how things work. But people like me living on dial-up, sad huh?, cannot install an entire system downloading it a bit at a time. It would take a year. I have to go to another computer and download one iso and burn it to bring home, and can only do this once or twice a month. That is why I am using the universal installation disc and the packages disc. I would much rather have source packages and compile them myself in the traditional manner, but I cannot download so many files. It is a work computer which I cannot oversee and so must go with one click downloads. If there were several iso images available of the files which I could use then I would go with that, but as it is I have to compromise. I understand why, but wish it were a bit different. > > Some things you can do : delete /usr/portage/distfiles/* - can save > lots, but often the same distfile is used for updates/rebuilds, so I > would copy them to another system running rsync (point make.conf to it) > if possible and clean this directory on a regular basis. > > portage can be put on a compressed loopback which is supposed to give > good gains, both in space and speed. > > Use flags: some ebuilds like xorg have a "minimal" use flag. "-docs" > which removes extra documentation is also a good one. > > Look into building only one or two locales which saved a huge amount of > space, but I did run into some errors because of things some apps were > expecting were reomoved - a full emerge -ep may have fixed this tho. > > Keep only the current kernel installed (or delete all of them! > - /usr/src/linux*) If you want to keep the kernel source, do a "make > clean" after install to save a few hundred M. > > Use one partition for the bulk of the system to avoid wasting space. > > A problem with the above is that its hard to remove all the fluff on > built system, so the best effect is on a new install. Believe it or > not, it is possible to put a fully usable desktop with office apps on a > bootable 256M USB key with room to spare! Very tricky methods used, but > thats the fun of it. > > BillK Thanks for all of these tips. I am definitely going to keep them to look into as I find out just how things are working. Cleaning up the kernel files is certainly something I should have thought of. I am going to do that right now, and I am going to look in the distfiles directory as well. Many thanks, patrick -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
