At 03:21 11/11/2003, you wrote:
But yeah, ideally some-one should modify the package groups to exclude all the unnecessary bloat in the minimal installation.
If some-one submitted a truly minimal kickstart configuration people could use this too. :) For until the packages are shifted out of the basic installation set.... :)
Join the "fedora-minimal" project here:
http://simpaticus.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-minimal_simpaticus.com
if you want to help. The "fedora-minimal" project will likely only take a few weeks to do what it needs and then stop. The basic objectives right now are the following:
1. Start with a minimum install according to Anaconda.
2. Pare down to the minimum PRACTICAL and USABLE system. This means leave a text editor, and iptables, and a tool to synchronize the machine's clock, for example, even though the system could boot without any of them, because I would NEVER install a system without them. Select always the smallest tool from Fedora Core packages that will do the job. The results of this effort are the "base" package group.
3. Define a set of "upgrade" packages that replace base packages, taking up more space but adding much more functionality. For example, base includes nano as a text editor but "upgrades" offers vim-common/vim-minimal as an alternative, giving you a far better text editor and costing you 11MB. Base also includes rdate to set the time (10K) but upgrades offers ntpd (2MB) as a more powerful option.
4. Define a set of "optional" packages for convenience. These packages have nothing to do with the "smallest possible install", but rather are the packages necessary to do the job for which we wanted a small install in the first place, those packages which we want to have easily accessible. Included here are vsftpd, BIND (named), httpd, samba, dhcp, kickstart, etc.
5. Create a kickstart file that installs only the base packages.
6. Create a kickstart file that is easily customizable to install packages from the upgrades set.
7. If the time and resources are available, create an ISO with all these packages and modify the installer to offer the packages in upgrades and optional during installation. At that point, individual users will be able to create their own kickstart files using any of the available packages.
Currently, the smallest install on my Fedora system is down around 310MB. Some more experimentation is going on, and since ours is a small list where improvements are made incrementally, someone just coming in would be well-advised to run through the archives and offer opinions on what we've done so far.
Once we're done, I will probably contribute our efforts to both the Fedora and RULE projects so that they can continue as they see fit. At this point, Fedora-minimal is intended to reach an objective and cease... it is not expected to be an ongoing effort (although who knows, I didn't expect to start this in the first place). Also, at this point we are using STRICTLY Fedora Core packages. Later on we may choose to substitute other packages, assuming that we can comply properly with Fedora guidelines for this (don't want to disturb any trademarks or rules).
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
