[PLUG] how small will Gentoo go?

Auke Kok sofar at foo-projects.org
Tue Nov 7 05:21:30 UTC 2006


Carlos Konstanski wrote:
>> hey all,
>>
>> How small can you make a Gentoo installation? I want to roll my own
>> firewall/WAP/router Linux, and I want it to be as small as possible, 
>> and to
>> be easily customizable and upgradeable. Which sounds like Gentoo, does 
>> it not?
>> Pyramid Linux, Pebble, and other WAP Linuxes weigh in from 50-128 
>> megabytes.
>> How does Gentoo compare? Here's a sample feature list:
>>
>> -iptables
>> -openvpn
>> -support only for installed devices
>> -openssh
>> -stunnel
>> -dnsmasq
>> -maybe some kind of public WAP frontend like Wifidog or nocat auth
>> -ntpd
>> -the usual gnu tools and essential system administration tools, some
>> net tools
>>
>> I want to keep it under 64 megabytes.
>>
>> thanks!
> 
> Gentoo will never be a small-footprint distro because of the portage
> tree.  I put a minimal installation on a 3.2GB hard drive once. It fit
> until I added X and mozilla.  That put it over the top.  A similar
> debian box could probably squeeze into a gig and a half or less.

it can't because it needs (like any source distro, see e.g. others like lunar-linux.org 
or sourcemage.org) gcc and a rather complete set of headers and tools.

Anything under 500mb (not gentoo, but a really lightweight source distro like lunar) is 
an accomplishment, allthough these source distro's are rather easy to minimize and 
maintain manually (compile on a remote machine, and install sort of slackware-ish.... 
hey slackware, now that was a small distro).

If you really want to have a single maintainable source distro, you'd be looking at 
about 400mb minimal easily. Anything under that is pure occupational therapy.

Cheers

Auke (that other source distro guy)



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