[lug] The slow-lowmemory-headless-server-with-plenty-of-disk distro?

[Chris Riddoch]

On 11/14/06, Daniel Webb <lists at danielwebb.us> wrote:
> I had several systems in this size range running Debian stable and it worked
> very well.  The Debian base install (don't choose anything at install-time
> then add packages) is very small, something like 200M if I remember right.
> You can create a very usable server with all the normal services with 500M
> in Debian quite quickly and easily.
>
> One of the things I have yet to try with my new Ubuntu install is how easy
> will it be to strip out some of the packages that I don't use, since these old
> laptops have small drives.  For a server I think it's easier to start with
> nothing and add things manually though.

I tried doing a custom install of Ubuntu, but the "base system"
includes a lot of things like support for LVM and RAID which is
appropriate for other systems, but certainly not the system in
question.  It seems necessary to do a basic install first and then
*later* use the package manager to remove things that I really didn't
need in the first place.  Bleah.

At least, that's with my testing with QEMU so far.  No matter what I
do, Ubuntu wants to install the base-system packages before giving me
actual choices on what packages I want.  And there's that stuff in
base-system that I really don't need on my Soekris box.

*sigh*

-- 
epistemological humility
  Chris Riddoch