Today I had a go at building Vinux from scratch by starting with the minimal ubuntu install iso which is only about 10MB and installs a very basic console system. You can then use apt-get to install only the packages you actually want rather that starting with a full install and uninstalling what you don't need. Sounds great doesn't it! So I began to install what I considered to be essential applications like remastersys, yasr etc and it turns out that they require nearly 200mb of dependancies to run properly. By the time I had all the basics installed and ran remastsersys the new iso was just over 400MB in size, and that was before I had installed Orca and the Gnome desktop etc. Thus this method was not going to produce a smaller iso than I can by just uninstalling unwanted applications from the original iso. However it is a very simple way to create a basic system either with a console interface or a lightweight window manager like Fluxbox etc. I presume that GRML might have been produced through this kind of process (although not on an ubuntu base). This would be something I would consider doing if I wanted to use an old computer as a file server etc, or wanted to create a lightweight distro with the Fluxbox window manager but only basic accessibility features, like yasr and xzoom etc. So back to the drawing board! The only advantage this method would offer would be an Ubuntu 8.10 iso which contained the latest package updates without increasing its size. Food for thought! I still can't decide whether I should just make a 1GB iso containing everything, or a stripped down version that fits on a CD!
Sunday 8 February 2009
Building Vinux from Scratch!
Today I had a go at building Vinux from scratch by starting with the minimal ubuntu install iso which is only about 10MB and installs a very basic console system. You can then use apt-get to install only the packages you actually want rather that starting with a full install and uninstalling what you don't need. Sounds great doesn't it! So I began to install what I considered to be essential applications like remastersys, yasr etc and it turns out that they require nearly 200mb of dependancies to run properly. By the time I had all the basics installed and ran remastsersys the new iso was just over 400MB in size, and that was before I had installed Orca and the Gnome desktop etc. Thus this method was not going to produce a smaller iso than I can by just uninstalling unwanted applications from the original iso. However it is a very simple way to create a basic system either with a console interface or a lightweight window manager like Fluxbox etc. I presume that GRML might have been produced through this kind of process (although not on an ubuntu base). This would be something I would consider doing if I wanted to use an old computer as a file server etc, or wanted to create a lightweight distro with the Fluxbox window manager but only basic accessibility features, like yasr and xzoom etc. So back to the drawing board! The only advantage this method would offer would be an Ubuntu 8.10 iso which contained the latest package updates without increasing its size. Food for thought! I still can't decide whether I should just make a 1GB iso containing everything, or a stripped down version that fits on a CD!
