miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD

dnaumov writes "miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD is a great guide, which explains in great detail, how you can create a truly small installation of FreeBSD on your system, completely by yourself. There is also the PicoBSD project, which has similar goals, but it's based on an outdated version of FreeBSD and is considered to be way too minimalistic (2 floppies) by many. The guide will walk you through things like creating the directory tree inside a chroot jail, rebuilding the bootloader and everything else needed to create a FreeBSD install that takes just around 20 MB of space."

Comments

Re:Why does it have to be FreeBSD?

[evilviper]

FreeBSD's hardware advantage isn't all that significant. OpenBSD supports every network card I have ever tried (and that is a huge number of diverse types). So what exactly does FreeBSD support that is so important??? The only hardware I can recall OpenBSD not supporting is a few sound-cards I have, and that's a non-issue for this type of system.

Sure, it doesn't support SMP, but I don't consider that to be much of a drawback. SMP isn't all that popular, and would likely be even less so in these types of machines.

If you still want to site hardware/SMP support as a major issue, I can point out that Linux supports even more hardware, and (supposedly) has far better SMP support.

As for the advantages of OpenBSD, it is smaller, far less complex to setup/configure/maintain, more secure, and has plenty of great programs that FreeBSD lacks (Systrace and PF kick ass).

Re:Amazingly, almost half of that is perl!

[awx]

I think you'll find that it was incredulity that one program and it's associated libs takes up that amount of space. So? Replace it with python for example, and that'd take up the same space - it's not language bashing, just program-size bashing. get off your perl high-horse, perf.