Ubuntu on 4GiB
This is about Ununtu, but first an admission. I run Vista, ok I admit it. It’s slick and smooth, but it doesn’t tolerate badly written software and/or drivers. My install was stable for a while, but slowly went down hill.. After a fresh install all is ok and slick again :-).
Back to the subject. I also love Linux, but I can’t stand re-booting to switch. So I run it under VirtualBox.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with the idea of having a personal development machine under VirtualBox, but I want to keep it small enough to fit on my memory stick. That’s 8GiB, and I want space for my files as well, so I have decided that 4GiB should be about alright….
Considerations:
- Must fit in 4GiB.
- Must have enough memory for NetBeans.
- Will mostly store lots of small files.
Here’s what I have gone for so far:
- Create fixed size 4GiB virtual hard disk.
- Allocate 768MiB memory. My laptop has 4GiB total.
- 200MiB boot partition.
- Remainder is encrypted ReiserFS3 for ‘/’. No other partitions. No swap.
- Remove all unwanted packages. I don’t need games, media apps or OpenOffice.
- Install Java from Add/Remove programs, and NetBeans 6.5 from standard installer.
I’m investigating Xubuntu, and trying to find more packages to remove. Ultimately I want the basic install with development apps to be under 2GiB, leaving my 2GiB for my projects. It doesn’t sound like much, until you consider that these applications tend to be made up of lots of small source code files, which ReiserFS stores very efficiently.
More later.
[Edit]
I’ve whittled it down to 2.2GiB. Ubuntu links a lot of packages to key Ubuntu packages, so they can’t be removed. This is irritating, because I don’t want lots of themes, lots of wallpapers, CUPS support etc. That said, I will stick with vanilla Ubuntu over Xubuntu, because of the excellent virtual fs support in Gnome. This lets me browse ftp sites, smb and scp as normal folders. It’s absolutely invaluable when dealing with multiple customer upload accounts.
If you don’t need Gnomes excellent filesystem support, then Xubuntu may be the way to go. It saves another 400MiB, which is significant when dealing with these storage sizes.
I wish ReiserFS4 could progress to stability, and make it into the kernel. Compression along with its superior packing strategy would be brilliant at fitting everything I want into 4GiB. But alas it is not to be, as he had the poor taste to murder somebody that should have been dear to him, and that affords the FS an instant dismissal from the kernel.
