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 There is also the PicoBSD project, which has similar goals, but it's based on an outdated version of FreeBSD and is considered to be way too minimalistic (2 floppies) by many.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

Amazingly, almost half of that is perl!

[RLiegh]

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.

A new possible BSD ?

[dnaumov]

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.

PicoBSD and miniBSD have two different goals

[eht]

The Tentative PicoBSD FAQ has useful information on how to built a PicoBSD build out of the current source tree and therefore isn't anywhere near two years old, nor does it build to two floppies, there are three differnet versions of it with a fourth in psuedo permanent beta testing

miniBSD has a different aim of not so much tweaking, for example in PicoBSD SSH daemon and client are just two aspects of one program instead of two sperate programs because of all the shared code between them, it's more meant to run on compact flash and is easier to update since PicoBSD is a compressed bootable image

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).