What applications to install?

This board posts about running linux on your webdt366
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david_halliday
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What applications to install?

Post by david_halliday »

I am still looking at making a Debian Lenny (5.01) based install for the webdt. What applications do you think would be useful? I would like to keep the total install down to 512MB so that it will fit in the internal flash.  I think GTK apps seem to be the leanest but i am open to any suggestions.

Dave.
quotaholic
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Re: What applications to install?

Post by quotaholic »

Wow do I have a lot of information I could empart.

Reverse engineer what functionality you want to have and start planning your space. One of the biggest challenges I faced with lenny was not the text level base install but the extra fat that came in with all the groups. Possibly I dont know debian well enough yet but I didnt see it nesessasry for apt to install every video driver in the xorg tree. Picking all that and what all the other groups laid out in excess out was too much for me.  I could not figure a way to list the packages that were installed. My method was to do graphical expert from the LXDE / XFCE install disk.

Knowing that there will be some removal nuke all your man pages and doc folders. You will be amazed. Especially gtk-doc. I also free'd up notable space by shedding everything but english in the locale folder.

Functioanlity wise I just crossed my biggest hurdle with Slackware in that I have bundled in a wifi utility along with basic desktop functionality and made it fit in les than 400mb. Wifi utilities need an object oriented programming language. Python is very large at 62mb. Qt is 52. Java is 100. Yeah. Slackware does not have a package manager and that has a lot to do with space conservation too.

Apt-cache will take more space than you want to give. I would suggest getting your packages to a medium and planning a local install.

GTK-2 is 36 megs but 18 of that is documenation. All of the glib libraries are huge expecially the i18n one. I use only one of them. Libxml2 is going to be needed for XFCE or Pcmanfm. If your not concerned with looks gtk1 libraries are very fast and dvery small but kinda ugly. Fluxbox and xfm file manager build on gtk-1.

Slackware kind of offers a cheat sheet letting me know which packages are madatory as I check them off. Pcmanfm is tiny. That with say Icewm or LXDE would be nice. Good ratios of function vs real estate. JWM absolutely flew on lenny. Its a window manager with three deps. X11, zlib and libjpeg. Its less than a meg. Its hard to get to the real nitty because the two distributions are different enough were we may not be able to compare our notes to the fine detail levels.

I have been adding to this incrementally. Its a hard question to hit in one sitting.

X11, Mesa and a few of the font packages in the xorg groups I try to avoid as mesa is like 36mb itself. I remove the majority of the adobe fonts and the indic as well as the dejavu-ttf. Remove most of the standard x apps but they really dont take much. Thinking things like xproxy, xeyes, xed. All x11 input and video gets removed except for keyboard, mouse, v4l, vesa, fbdev, and you ay see a geode option in the repos. I go with the standard xerver as well as the fb server.  Other than these I dont try to slim x too much. Too many bad experiences with deps and late night wgets.

Networking, is usually an area of much in unneeded apps. I grab the autofs, bluez, curl, dhcpcd, ethtool, gnutlz, gpgme, inetd, eth-tools, network-scripts, pcmcia, wireless-tools, the one that begins with "I" that does dns, nmap, iptraf, telnet, and I am sure there are some I am missing but thats about it.

Look in to compressing your kernel modules and avoiding build tools if you can help it. Once can always get a config built on a larger chip and apply a filesystem compresson like union or sqush to make it fit. I gained about twenty when some kind person taught me how to do it.

I could go on and on..... Not sure if this is kinda what you were looking for or not but I took six pages of notes on individual packages I installed that I would be happy to share.

Also look at the new penmount announcement as it may shed some new light on out efforts.


quotahlic
Last edited by quotaholic on Wed Apr 22, 2009 1:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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