Hello.

I am planning to migrate my home systems to Slackware ("current"). I am what is called a "minimalist", and at least one of my machines will have very few packages installed (for example: set A + gcc [& glibc], vi, screen, nasm, gdb). Because of this, I am trying to figure out how to perform a minimal (but functional in the sense that "what is installed does not have unmet dependencies") Slackware installation. So far I've come up with the following scenario: perform a temporary install during which i'd select set A, desired packages from set D and perhaps "everything in L". then, start uninstalling packages from L until nothing remains but "what is needed". write down surviving packages, reinstall and take advantage of the accumulated experience.

This would probably work for those systems which do not use X, however, for those machines which *do* need X (even though they'll have a fairly austere GUI environment) - the method described above does not look as "acceptable".

In conclusion: do I have any alternative [ideally - simpler, less time and nerve consuming] methods to achieve my goal?

P.S.: Is the "A" set self-sustainable? I.e.: would installing "A" and -nothing- else lead to a functional, complete, base system? Or does it rely on parts of "L"?

Maybe it'll be helpful: Samac's Super Slimline Speedy Slackware

After installing desired applications, one could do some dependency tracking with ldd to figure out when stuff breaks while removing L-packages.
Something like:
ldd `find / -xdev -type f -perm -000100` > /tmp/deptrack
grep -E "(^\/|not found$)" /tmp/deptrack | grep -B 1 "not found"
Might ease the process at least.

And I would think that the A-set is self substaining, the aaa_elflibs package contains most libs that would be needed by a minimal install.

I'm doing the same thing now days. I followed the same guide w1k0 gave you. The way I do it, is that I've got a copy of /var/log/packages from a full installation. That way I can easily grep <lib> *, to find out what package I need to run a specific program.

I do this in a virtual machine, and I will store the tagfiles when I'm happy with the result. For me this method has worked well. I did not include l at all. As e5150 mentioned, a basic system will do with packages from a. The other programs you are going to run will probably need some packages from l. I would think its faster to install packages as you need them (using ldd and grep) so you don't have to manually remove all the libs you won't need. Perhaps that's what his scripts is doing, but for me it works fine to install the libs manually

Hey, you will probably want to take others advice and use tagfiles ( http://www.slackbook.org/html/packag...-tagfiles.html )
All that info is also available inside the slackDVD.

To edit the tagfiles use SKP(skip-installing), ADD(install), REC(recommend), and OPT(optional) and it will ask about the optional and recommended.

I also am trying to pare slack down to fluxbox or XFCE4 and some singular apps.

You could practice installs using portable-qemu as long as you have a pc with at least 512RAM
and a moderately fast CPU.
I built portable-slack on a 1.8Ghz 768MB RAM Emachines so if yours is better than that your set.

Check this post and the readme inside for instructions-
( http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...how-to-725812/ )

Thank you very much for your time and suggestions.