Minimal install

bassmadrigal · 08-22-2016, 01:47 PM

Well, willysr has made available Mate packages for Slackware, so you shouldn't need to compile it. However, I'm pretty sure the packages were made with a Full install, so I'm not sure what dependencies are and are not needed.

http://slackware.org.uk/msb/

There's several small projects that might fit your bill, although, I don't keep up with them: salix (not updated to 14.2 yet), zenwalk (not sure on their release structure), mled (14.2 is available).

It should be noted that while these are all based on Slackware, they aren't Slackware and we may only be able to provide limited support. It would probably be best to take any support issues to their respective forums.

nobodino · 08-23-2016, 11:54 AM

if you want minimal and access to internet, you need to add to the 26 previous packages:
- iputils, net-tools, network-scripts and ncftp (to get packages),
so you can:
- ifconfig eth0 192.168.x.x broadcast 192.168.x.255 netmask 255.255.255.0
- route add default gw 192.168.x.100 metric 1

nobodino · 08-23-2016, 12:08 PM

to answer your question, here is a list in 4 steps:
- bare system
- upgrade system
- access internet
- bare x11 system

philanc · 08-23-2016, 07:13 PM

1st Step to Enlightenment

You perform a full install of Slackware. Start wondering about what what you could cut. Cut. cut. cut a bit too much and wreck your install. Start again.

2nd Step to Enlightenment

You learn about tags, read forums about minimal install. After all, these packages are like a large box full of Lego bricks.

Start installing a minimal Slackware . In Qemu or in a partition beside your full install (whatever you want to try, keep the full install in a working condition!)

3rd Step to Enlightenment

Packages are not Lego bricks. They are Duplo bricks. The Lego bricks are the individual executable files and libraries.

You start playing with 'ldd'. Take firefox (or whatever your most used app is) and try to figure out all the libraries and files it REALLY requires to work.

This step will involve a lot of learning about Linux, Slackware, boot, udev, X, whatever. With growing excitement, you will find that don't need most of what is in /bin, /sbin, /usr, ... You will discover the elegance of busybox, read about truly minimal linux, eg. variants of "kernel + busybox"... and start pondering true minimalism.

"Let's start building a much smaller kernel, with modules for my home PC, my office PC and maybe some friends PC". Make serious compromises. No development tools, no locale, no udev, only the firmware for the couple of PCs above, cut in the X modules, obviously no doc or man pages, etc. -- just the minimum to support firefox. (crap. must not forget the sound subsystem. Firefox wants gst. crap.)

After quite some effort, you get your small image. Everything fits in an initrd compressed to less than 100MB.

You cannot do much with it, but wow, this IS minimal. And you still have your full Slackware install beside.

4th Step to Enlightenment

You notice that you use your full Slackware install for anything that matters. But your minimal linux still kick ass.

You are a security conscious guy, so you perform regular security upgrades on your full install. And for your minimal linux? well, hmmm...

5th Step to Enlightenment

A new Slackware release comes out. Granted, not so often :-)

You install it in yet another partition, test it and decide to migrate to it.
You ponder upon updating your minimal linux.

You keep pondering...

Until you realize that life is good with the new Slackware install, ... and decide to look for a new hobby.

:-)

Jack-1948 · 08-29-2016, 08:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nobodino

to answer your question, here is a list in 4 steps:
- bare system
- upgrade system
- access internet
- bare x11 system

Thanks for the list and I seen Blackbox is it a desktop? Can I use Openbox as a desktop and not Blackbox if it is a desktop?

nobodino · 08-30-2016, 09:39 AM

Maybe will it work, I don't know what are the dependancy packages for openbox, try to replace blackbox by openbox and look at the result?

leeeoooooo · 09-02-2016, 09:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal

In addition to 55020's comments, the people typically wanting a minimal install are not ones that tend to provide things back to Slackware (you rarely see those types of people sticking around in the forum). This is likely why we've only seen one documented case of a minimal install that I semi-recently recall (could've been more that I forgot about, but I don't think so). It was called stripslack and was provided by kikinovak, but he felt it wasn't worth it to maintain it.

And that's the thing with minimal installs. For most, it isn't worth it to try and maintain it. *Most* of the requests for minimal installs seem to be for people who don't understand how resources work in Linux and/or Slackware. *For most*, they won't see any tangible benefit by doing a minimal install, and we aren't likely to sugarcoat that.

Yes, there are valid reasons for minimal installs, but *most* people don't need it. They want it because of some ill-formed belief that it will use less RAM or CPU power. They also may not have a full grasp of how dependency management in Slackware works, and will likely blame Slackware when a program they have installed fails to start due to a missing library. For those that want to do it as a learning exercise, I say, more power to them. It is a great learning exercise to figure out how things work together in Slackware and, in turn, Linux. But for people who are just trying to minimize resources, it's likely a waste of their time and ours.

But I think the biggest issue is what 55020 brought up: they don't provide us their use-case on why they want a minimal install. As nobodino showed, you can have a minimal install with just 26 packages, but what does that provide the user? What else do they need? Do they need networking? X? Sound? Video? Developer tools? There is no one ideal minimal install, because there are uses for each and every package included with Slackware. Unless they tell us what they're attempting to do (and preferably why), there's not much more we can suggest beyond nobodino's package list, but I'd imagine most users wanting a minimal install would be pretty disappointed with how little they could do with those packages.

bassmadrigal,
I feel you are discounting those of us who wish to learn about how little we can get away with and those of us trying to use limited hardware. These were both motivations for me when I visited the other similar threads (as AlienBOB suggested) trying to figure out how to install Slackware on my newly acquired Acer Eeepc 2G Surf.

I wanted to get a working Slack system in a 2GB SSD along with functional hibernation, so I could close the thing up instantly, slip it in my pocket, and the open it up right where I left off at a later time. System itself would have to fit in as little of 1GB as possible.

I found nobodino's list an excellent starting place for what I wanted to do. It gave me the base I could use to build the system I wanted.

In my case I was more interested as much of the D group (and associated L packages) as I could fit, less interested in X, but after a while curious with how much or little X I could fit on my little system.

Eventually, I bought a 16GB SD card for my Eeepc and was able to do a 'full' install.

But I sure learned an awful lot about what it really takes to get a working Slackware system working by trying to work with less than 'everything.'

bassmadrigal · 09-02-2016, 09:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeeoooooo

bassmadrigal,
I feel you are discounting those of us who wish to learn about how little we can get away with and those of us trying to use limited hardware. These were both motivations for me when I visited the other similar threads (as AlienBOB suggested) trying to figure out how to install Slackware on my newly acquired Acer Eeepc 2G Surf.

I wanted to get a working Slack system in a 2GB SSD along with functional hibernation, so I could close the thing up instantly, slip it in my pocket, and the open it up right where I left off at a later time. System itself would have to fit in as little of 1GB as possible.

I found nobodino's list an excellent starting place for what I wanted to do. It gave me the base I could use to build the system I wanted.

In my case I was more interested as much of the D group (and associated L packages) as I could fit, less interested in X, but after a while curious with how much or little X I could fit on my little system.

Eventually, I bought a 16GB SD card for my Eeepc and was able to do a 'full' install.

But I sure learned an awful lot about what it really takes to get a working Slackware system working by trying to work with less than 'everything.'

I didn't mean to discount that, and I thought I made it clear in that post that there are valid reasons for minimal installs. We just don't see them often. Very few people nowadays have hardware limitations that require less than a full install. That is the only reason I didn't mention it specifically in my post. A few years back, SSDs were quite a bit smaller and quite a bit more expensive than they are today, so it was more common for people to not have a ton of space to devote to a full install if they were dual-booting between multiple distros and/or Windows. Today, a lack of storage is *typically* not an issue, so I neglected to mention it in this post. But, that is why I continually said "most" throughout my post, because there are of course situations that might warrant a minimal install.

There are certainly valid reasons to do minimal installs, and learning how Slackware works is one of those valid reasons (as I stated in the post you quoted). But, it seems most people want minimal installs to conserve resources, of which, other than storage space, as long as you don't start up any of those programs, no additional resources will be used. Yes, KDE uses more memory than a lot of other DEs, but if you don't run KDE or any of it's apps, no extra memory will be used if you have KDE installed vs uninstalled. We see far too many posts from people who have stripped their system of what they think is unnecessary cruft, only to realize they can't run some piece of software or compile something else. They don't have the knowledge of Slackware and dependencies to realize what has happened, so we have to figure out they aren't running a full installation (which they usually neglect to let us know in their posts), and then let them know that they're missing an important component.

I'll close with what I wrote in the previous post, but know that the "resources" I'm talking about is CPU and RAM usage, not storage space.

Quote:

But for people who are just trying to minimize resources, it's likely a waste of their time and ours.

leeeoooooo · 09-02-2016, 04:34 PM

Just for fun I decided to set up a virtual machine and install a minimal Slackware using nobodino's list of 26 packages just to see if it still works under Slackware64 14.2. It does.

Now, some years ago I upgraded to a REAL Unix system, a MacBook Pro, but I keep Slackware current always handy using VirtualBox.

I also added two more packages, lilo and elvis, but I just can't live without those.

The list is a little bit out of date, specifying "-smp" kernels while that is no longer a consideration.

By the way, ALL of nobodino's packages are from the a/ group. This would have been an important consideration back in the day these were real floppy sets.

Building a useful system from this minimal base will involve getting intimately familiar with the PACKAGES list. This system includes pkgtools so adding additional packages is no problem.

No dfree so I can't report free space yet.

bassmadrigal · 09-02-2016, 05:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeeoooooo

Just for fun I decided to set up a virtual machine and install a minimal Slackware using nobodino's list of 26 packages just to see if it still works under Slackware64 14.2. It does.

That list was designed for 14.2. It is the same between the 32bit and 64bit versions except the kernel won't have smp in it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeeoooooo

The list is a little bit out of date, specifying "-smb" kernels while that is no longer a consideration.

It is smp, not smb, and it stands for symmetric multiprocessing. It is only listed on the 32bit kernels, so that list was based on regular Slackware, not Slackware64.

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeeoooooo

By the way, ALL of nobodino's packages are from the a/ group. This would have been an important consideration back in the day these were real floppy sets.

There's a reason for that. The a/ series is the base Slackware system

Pat has a list of the categories and what the categories mean in the Slackware-HOWTO on your installation media:

Code:

      A  The base Slackware system.  (608 MB)
     AP  Linux applications.  (511 MB)
      D  Program development tools.  (1.2 GB)
      E  GNU Emacs.  (110 MB)
      F  FAQs and HOWTOs for common tasks.  (33 MB)
      K  Linux 4.4.14 kernel source.  (721 MB)
    KDE  The KDE desktop environment and applications.  (1.5 GB)
   KDEI  Language support for KDE.  (1.1 GB)
      L  System libraries.  (1.4 GB)
      N  Networking applications and utilities.  (406 MB)
      T  TeX typesetting language.  (290 MB)
    TCL  Tcl/Tk/TclX scripting languages and tools.  (18 MB)
      X  X Window System graphical user interface.  (374 MB)
    XAP  Applications for the X Window System.  (800 MB)
   XFCE  The XFCE desktop environment and applications.  (53 MB)
      Y  Classic text-based BSD games.  (6 MB)

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeeoooooo

Building a useful system from this minimal base will involve getting intimately familiar with the PACKAGES list. This system includes pkgtools so adding additional packages are no problem.

That is why tar, xz, and coreutils are included as well. The packages provided by nobodino will provide you a bootable system that will allow you to install additional Slackware packages.

Quote:

Originally Posted by leeeoooooo

No dfree so I can't report free space yet.

I think you mean df, and it's included in the coreutils package, which is part of the packages nobodino provided. According to readelf, it requires libc.so.6, which is created with the doinst.sh of glibc-solibs, so it should work fine. There's also du, which allows you to view sizes of folders rather than disks.

leeeoooooo · 09-02-2016, 05:53 PM

Yes, I know well what the file groups represent.
I guess I am a bit rusty, though. dfree is what I always call it, but I forgot the spelling is more Unix-style ;-)

285MB used on an 8GB ext4 formatted drive.

nobodino has provided a valuable service IMHO.

nobodino · 09-04-2016, 02:45 AM

upgraded with more options.
-dynamic access to internet with text browser (lynx)
-use of slackpkg to make slackware grow

kjhambrick · 09-04-2016, 05:13 AM

Nice job nobodino

That's a minimal Slackware, alright !

Very educational.

Q1: would lynx require libssl to access https sites ?

Q2: does slackpkg require wget ( or curl ) for downloading packages ?

EDIT: I missed ncftp among the 4-packages for static INet Access ... wget / curl would not be required to download another package

Regardless, having wget ( or curl ) for luddites like me who installpkg / removepkg / upgradepkg rather than slackpkg might be pretty handy at the cost of an additional 2.6M ( or 2.8M )...

Once I have wget ( or curl ), I could install anything else I might need ( or simply want )

Thanks for working on this list nobodino !

-- kjh

Code:

# sed -e '/^PACKAGE LOCATION/q'  /var/log/packages/wget-1.18-x86_64-1

PACKAGE NAME:     wget-1.18-x86_64-1
COMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE:     576K
UNCOMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE:     2.6M
PACKAGE LOCATION: slackware64/n/wget-1.18-x86_64-1.txz
<<snip>>

Code:

# sed -e '/^PACKAGE LOCATION/q'  /var/log/packages/curl-7.50.1-x86_64-1_slack14.2

PACKAGE NAME:     curl-7.50.1-x86_64-1_slack14.2
COMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE:     1.1M
UNCOMPRESSED PACKAGE SIZE:     2.8M
PACKAGE LOCATION: patches/packages/curl-7.50.1-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz

gnashley · 09-04-2016, 07:01 AM

Okay, since we're well on the slippery slope, where's firefox, ffmpeg and *all* the codecs? I mean, we need to be able to entertain ourselves while stuff is downloading, right?

My point is, that the smallest thing to practically call minimal -without encumbering later additions, is a system that allows you to boot on local hardware, login and install further packages found locally. Once you start with any network stuff, you are in the later additions zone. I was very glad to see that two other posters here also know that a *truly* minimal linux-based system only requires a single binary, a couple of links, a couple of dirs and one special device node:
/bin/sh (can really be anything at all)
/etc/init (or /sbin/it or /bin/init which can ponit to /bin/sh or be unnecessary with init=/bin/sh)
/dev/console

nobodino · 09-04-2016, 12:00 PM

Up to you to choose the barest system with only 26 packages.
The mininal system depends on your own needs, it can be:
-bare console system,
-bare with X11 with as few packages as it's possible (I couldn't downsize the number of packages)
-bare with access to internet or without.
I won't go any further.
You can use it as it's or make it grow.
Q1: the list misses openssl-solibs for lynx

Q2: slackpkg needs wget+which+gawk+bzip2+dialog