Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
Hi Ian Do you have a website were you publish your concept? That would be nice wouldn't it? Unfortunately, no, I never had time to do that. yes it would :-). I sucessfully have now an minimalistic system. Solving problems with files not identified while root-FS mounted ro (currently 3) and some misc from baselayout (awk functions for depscan and env-update). I plan to write some text in gentoo-wiki, if I find some time... A System with X is also my intension. then you'll probably have more problems than I did. I ran a very simple installation. Hopefully not :-)... let's see in a few days/weeks. THX, Sascha. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
Hi Neil, You could use find to copy all symlinks, then use the symlinks -d -r / to remove all those that point nowhere. Or you could start with an empty partition and use find to copy newer files instead of deleting the older ones. One way would be to direct the output of find -newer /reference/file to a file and use this as the --files-from argument to rsync. I just want to say thank you for your tips. This 2 are realy usefull. I now have an minimalistic system. Sascha. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 21:23 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote: [snip] I sucessfully have now an minimalistic system. Solving problems with files not identified while root-FS mounted ro (currently 3) and some misc from baselayout (awk functions for depscan and env-update). I plan to write some text in gentoo-wiki, if I find some time... A System with X is also my intension. then you'll probably have more problems than I did. I ran a very simple installation. Hopefully not :-)... let's see in a few days/weeks. post back when you get to the next stage, I'd be interested in seeing how you go. thanks, -- Iain Buchanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 10:27 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote: Hi Iain, thanks a lot for your post (for the tips etc.). no worries Do you have a website were you publish your concept? That would be nice wouldn't it? Unfortunately, no, I never had time to do that. A System with X is also my intension. then you'll probably have more problems than I did. I ran a very simple installation. Glad to be some help! -- Iain Buchanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 23:07 +1200, Nick Rout wrote: On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 12:01 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote: Hi, I'm thinking of a small footprint gentoo produced in this way: 1) install everything you need 2) note current system time 3) reboot and do all operations you need in this small gentoo 4) remount with noatime 5) find all files in the FS that have an atime before the system time you note in 2) 6) delete all files found in 5); they were not accessed, so we don't need them? What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work? no what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs etc? look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs. Or.. create your own embedded gentoo. I'm doing it. Currently it's ~30 MB with kernel (very big kernel which have not stripped) and SSH and dhcp. -- Ow Mun Heng Gentoo/Linux on DELL D600 1.4Ghz 1.5GB RAM 98% Microsoft(tm) Free!! Neuromancer 21:18:33 up 2:05, 6 users, load average: 1.41, 1.52, 1.25 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
Hi Iain, thanks a lot for your post (for the tips etc.). I did much of the initial work to prove the concept and handed it over to someone else to turn into a reproducible system. As far as I know, we've had 3 or 4 running continuously for quite a few months now. Do you have a website were you publish your concept? Our particular requirement was to make a running system for a 64 Mb sandisk, with enough space left over for about 10-12 Mb of our own software. This is an embedded control system (no X), and we wanted a very similar installation on our HMI (X, gnome, and other such boggy apps :) running the same kernel so we could copy programs between them if need be. (The HMI runs a complete installation.) A System with X is also my intension. If you're planning on doing it in a short amount of time, think again! It won't be trivial, but the concept is at least possible. I'm very lucky that you have no unresolvable problems (yet), so I'm looking forward. In the next few month I will start to work on this. Currently I'm thinking (thinking only, nothing is done) of using qemu for the identification boot/run. It would be amazingly if a mechanism can be found, to dynamicaly bring in a file into an intial emtpy system. THX, Sascha. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:32:18 +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote: 1. symlinks aren't (or at least weren't in my case) picked up by the process, probably because when you access a symlink, only the date of the target appears to be altered. I had to manually copy many symlinks (which were mostly like /lib/libgcc_s.so - libgcc_s.so.1) to even get the system to boot. And the error messages threw me way off. You could use find to copy all symlinks, then use the symlinks -d -r / to remove all those that point nowhere. 3. don't delete everything you don't need, because you _will_ make a mistake. In fact, we redid the entire process a few times from scratch, to refine it more. To make it easier, make two partitions, or if your final copy will only have one disk and one partition, put in a spare disk just for the testing phase. Make an exact copy on both before you start deleting. Then you can keep going back to the full installation to get files you missed. In fact, we made the machine dual boot to both disks, just in case we wanted to test the full install versus our minimal install. Or you could start with an empty partition and use find to copy newer files instead of deleting the older ones. One way would be to direct the output of find -newer /reference/file to a file and use this as the --files-from argument to rsync. 4. write down the commands that you use to find and copy the files you want, that way the second and third and subsequent times you do it, you don't have to remember. Or use a script, then you don't have to worry about losing the piece of paper :) I run several commands from one line scripts, because means I can be sure of using the same options each time. -- Neil Bothwick Dyslexics of the world, untie! pgpiUgpxJSWAF.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
-Original Message- From: Sascha Lucas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 22 September 2005 13:01 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo no what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs etc? I realy know what will run on such a system. Think of a router, or a datacollector. Pleas tell me what is cro? I believe he meant cron. Besides cron jobs and associated executables, there's files which are accessed intermittently and written/read from even more sparsely. Unless you somehow log the file paths for all such interactions how will you ever know what to delete and what not? I guess you can keep backups and experiment so that you don't find out something's missing the hard way, next time you decide to reboot. -- Regards, Mick -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
RE: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work? I don't think it stands a snowball's chance in ... Well, you get the idea. Sascha, I'm thinking that if you start with a bare-bones handbook install you'll have a minimum system, at least for gentoo support. It won't have X, desktops, many of the services tools, etc. If you're thinking about an embedded device (i.e. a router) then you wouldn't want to use a source-based install like gentoo on it, you'd either want to use a binary distribution (many examples of minimum linux distributions out there, check http://www.distrowatch.com for variations) or you could create a home-brew distribution from a customized setup based upon gentoo, but a hand-generated distrib could be difficult to pull together (difficult to identify all of necessary files that must be on the distro). -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Thu, 22 Sep 2005, Sascha Lucas wrote: I realy know what will run on such a system. Think of a router, or a datacollector. You might want to look at GNAP from the Embedded Gentoo project - it sounds close to the minimal setup you are looking for. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/gnap.xml To get the tools: emerge gnap gnap-dev Im interested in this and currently also working my way through O'Reilly's Building Embedded Linux Systems book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/belinuxsys/ -- Aj. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 14:00 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote: no what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs etc? I realy know what will run on such a system. Think of a router, or a datacollector. Pleas tell me what is cro? look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs. I already did this. There you can specify what files/packages to remove. my intention is to know every file that can be removed. Well the .spec files for the minimal install cd gives you quite a few clues. You might also take a look at the build system for ipcop, it is built using LFS coupled with its own make files. IIRC it includes in the build system a list of files that will be installed on the target system. The build system source code is only in the order of 1 MB I think (Naturally it downloads a lot of other sources to actually build, but you don't need to do that to look at the target file list. Sascha. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 07:29:53 +1200 Nick Rout wrote: I already did this. There you can specify what files/packages to remove. my intention is to know every file that can be removed. Well the .spec files for the minimal install cd gives you quite a few clues. Specifically: http://www.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/src/releng/specs/2005.1/x86/livecd-stage2-minimal.spec?root=gentoorev=1.1view=markup -- Nick Rout [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
I saw a post (I think it was this list, and the following was from memory) a month or two back of someone who did just this. They installed with a past date, then ran the system for a week or so and exercised it extensively. They then did the remove everything based on atime that hadnt been touched. The result was very successful, but they did come across the odd file they had to put back. Testing after the initial delete was considerable. From my point of view, such a stripped system would always be classified as unstable as you never know when it will ask for a file you removed as it is just too complex to check every circumstance. BillK On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 23:07 +1200, Nick Rout wrote: On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 12:01 +0200, Sascha Lucas wrote: Hi, I'm thinking of a small footprint gentoo produced in this way: 1) install everything you need 2) note current system time 3) reboot and do all operations you need in this small gentoo 4) remount with noatime 5) find all files in the FS that have an atime before the system time you note in 2) 6) delete all files found in 5); they were not accessed, so we don't need them? What do you think about this? Does it have a chance to work? no what about stuff that doesn't run all the time? stuff that cro needs etc? look at catalyst, it is the tool for building custom gentoo installs. THX, Sascha. -- Air conditioned environment - do not open windows! -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 07:05 +0800, W.Kenworthy wrote: I saw a post (I think it was this list, and the following was from memory) a month or two back of someone who did just this. They installed with a past date, then ran the system for a week or so and exercised it extensively. They then did the remove everything based on atime that hadnt been touched. The result was very successful, but they did come across the odd file they had to put back. Testing after the initial delete was considerable. yeah, that was probably me (earlier on in the year at least). For the initial install, I made the date somewhere around the epoch, or somehow I altered every file on the filesystem to be this date (can't remember). Then I fixed the date and booted the system. I posted quite a few questions and findings on the mailing list and ended up with that option. It works quite well in theory, however here are some notes to help you: 1. symlinks aren't (or at least weren't in my case) picked up by the process, probably because when you access a symlink, only the date of the target appears to be altered. I had to manually copy many symlinks (which were mostly like /lib/libgcc_s.so - libgcc_s.so.1) to even get the system to boot. And the error messages threw me way off. 2. The more you want the system to do, the harder it will be. We didn't want a whole host of features (no X), in fact only really ssh, ftpd, iptables, and limited others. 3. don't delete everything you don't need, because you _will_ make a mistake. In fact, we redid the entire process a few times from scratch, to refine it more. To make it easier, make two partitions, or if your final copy will only have one disk and one partition, put in a spare disk just for the testing phase. Make an exact copy on both before you start deleting. Then you can keep going back to the full installation to get files you missed. In fact, we made the machine dual boot to both disks, just in case we wanted to test the full install versus our minimal install. 4. write down the commands that you use to find and copy the files you want, that way the second and third and subsequent times you do it, you don't have to remember. From my point of view, such a stripped system would always be classified as unstable as you never know when it will ask for a file you removed as it is just too complex to check every circumstance. I did much of the initial work to prove the concept and handed it over to someone else to turn into a reproducible system. As far as I know, we've had 3 or 4 running continuously for quite a few months now. Our particular requirement was to make a running system for a 64 Mb sandisk, with enough space left over for about 10-12 Mb of our own software. This is an embedded control system (no X), and we wanted a very similar installation on our HMI (X, gnome, and other such boggy apps :) running the same kernel so we could copy programs between them if need be. (The HMI runs a complete installation.) If you're planning on doing it in a short amount of time, think again! It won't be trivial, but the concept is at least possible. HTH, -- Iain Buchanan [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] idea about small footprint gentoo
On Fri, 23 Sep 2005 07:05:27 +0800 W.Kenworthy wrote: I saw a post (I think it was this list, and the following was from memory) a month or two back of someone who did just this. They installed with a past date, then ran the system for a week or so and exercised it extensively. They then did the remove everything based on atime that hadnt been touched. The result was very successful, but they did come across the odd file they had to put back. This seems to be the essence of the problem: if you are trying to build a router, reliability is the primary goal. For that matter it doesn't with the files that you may still have about, but which perhaps have no place on a router - ssh, maybe others. Testing after the initial delete was considerable. -- Nick Rout [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
