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miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD

Posted by michael on from the size-is-everything dept.

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 There is also the PicoBSD project, which has similar goals, but it's based on an outdated version of FreeBSD and is considered to be way too minimalistic (2 floppies) by many.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."

2 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Amazingly, almost half of that is perl! by RLiegh · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the article:

    I did another minimal FreeBSD install and started looking for things I could remove in order to save space. After much tinkering, my "miniBSD" only weighed 22 MB (all binaries linked dynamically) and still had all the functionality I wanted (including ssh, FTP, perl and all the basic commands one expects on a reasonable UNIX system). Without perl, it fits in about 12 MB.

    emphasis mine.
  2. A new possible BSD ? by dnaumov · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There is a thread on BSDForums, where people are discussing the possibility of either creating a script that would automate the creation of a "MiniBSD installation" or possibly creating a new BSD altogether, using the MiniBSD philosophy and FreeBSD base.