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Boiling Down Slackware Linux to the Essentials?

Posted by Cliff on from the lean-mean-Linux-machine dept.

noxious420 asks: "I need to crank out a large number of very basic Slackware based Linux boxes. I am familiar with the "canned" distribution sets that FreeBSD uses and I want to use a set similar to the "Minimal" - "The smallest configuration possible" set. In Slackware's Expert install mode, I have been able to boil it down to the very bare essentials that it needs to run, but there are some unused and leftover directories that I had to manually delete. I don't want to clean up these directories every time. Is there some way to get a true "minimal" Slackware install? "

5 of 9 comments (clear)

  1. Slackware packages by Rendus · · Score: 2

    Well, you could always tar xfvz whatever.tgz, delete what you don't want, then rearchive the resulting tree(s). Slack packages are just standard tarballs with an install.sh script that you may need to modify.

  2. Hmmm... by dlc · · Score: 3

    I've been thinking about doing something similar for a while: create a "standard" personal distribution that can just be dropped into place on a new machine. It seems like the best plan would be to install a new machine exactly how you want it, and, on a spare partition, create one bigass tarball. Copy this tarball to a CD. Create a boot disk, minimal kernel with CD support. Boot off the boot disk, create the new partitions, and then untar the image from the CD. Is this an oversimplification? Maybe, but maybe not. There's really no reason why Linux has to be more difficult than this. Of course, this assumes that the machines have similar hardware, which is often the case when you get machines in batches. darren
    Cthulhu for President!

    --
    (darren)
    1. Re:Hmmm... by adjuster · · Score: 2

      This works well. We rolled out a butttload of Linux and Win95/98 machines like this. I've done 'recovery CD's' for Win95/98 w/ this method, too. (Gee-- isn't that misuse of a GPL'd operating system and tools... *grin*) If you can swing it, a bootable CD makes it even handier-- albeit if you have to get into the BIOS to make the machine boot off of CD, the time-savings is negligable over just booting off floppy.

      As a more ambitious project, we made a little bootdisk w/ dhcpcd and support for the NIC's in the machines we were using, and used a little program called 'netpipe' to broadcast out .tar's to PC's hard disks over the wire. It _rocked_ to see 150+ machines pulling an image simultaneously at 800KB+ a second on garden variety 10Base-T.

      --
      The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
  3. Re:DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! by blkmajik · · Score: 2
    The main thing is to not use disk images, but instead what the origional poster said. One giant tar ball. I would love to see how many people could actually make an image of their harddrive fit on a CD. Even though this guy is sounding like he want's to put just a few megabytes of information on the harddrive, how many drives do you know are 650 MB or less now?

    The best way that I can think of to do this would make a simple tar ball like joshua said. Then on initial bootup have init run a shell script instead of the /etc/rc.d stuff. In this shell script you would set the host name and IP and that's about it. once that is completed write the config to disk and change /etc/inittab to run as normal and you are installed.

  4. Re:images by RGRistroph · · Score: 3

    Rather than making a disk image, I think you can use the command dump ( see "man dump" ) to put a giant file on a cd which you will restore to the disk with the dump command.

    To get a target machine to the point where you can mount a CD and run dump, I suggest checking out some of the linux floppy distributions.

    There is one other option. There used to be a web site that offered you all the choices offered in RedHat's install script, and then created a custom install floppy which would automatically install according to those specifications, no human intervention necessary. So you could just go to this site (or it's equivalent for slack or whatever other distribuiton you want, or download whatever tool the site is running and use it yourself) and then make a boot install disk and just shove it and the cdrom in every machine. I think the boot floppy/dump from cdrom method will work faster.