[lug] compact linux distributions

[Daniel Webb]

On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 09:27:51PM -0600, David Anselmi wrote:

> What do you mean by compact?  If you have 1GB of disk space you can run 
> Debian testing out of the box.  I have a web & mail server in <700MB of 
> disk with 64MB of memory on a machine that's close to 10 years old.
> 
> I think that Debian is easier to minimize than the RH distros, based on 
> my experience with RH9 and FC2.  And aptitude's tracking of 
> automatically installed packages rocks for just that (let me know if you 
> want details).

I agree, and I'm doing the same thing (all the basic servers with <700MB with
Debian testing).  It does take some experience with the Debian package
commands to get a really tight system, though.  I like the deborphan package a
lot for this:

Description: Find orphaned libraries
 deborphan finds "orphaned" packages on your system.
 It determines which packages have no other packages
 depending on their installation, and shows you a list of
 these packages. It is most useful when finding libraries,
 but it can be used on packages in all sections.

The localepurge package is also nice, it strips out all the locale stuff you
don't need.