Hey all. Just finished setting up Slackware on my new (cough) Dell Poweredge 1300 Dual P3 450MHZ beast, with 256MB RAM! This machine is going to be a web server, with Apache, PHP, and mySQL. I tried to slim down the install as much as possible. The packages I installed are listed below, so I have a couple of questions:

1) What packages are required for Apache, PHP, and MySQL (aside from their actual packages). I'm not sure what in Slack they depend on, so wanted to find out before I go about completing my server.

2) Does anyone see any packages that I don't really need? This server is running 2.6.13, has no sound or X, just MB, RAM, CPUs, CDROM, Floppy, NIC, and some SCSI HDs.

aaa_base
aaa_elflibs
bash
bin
bzip2
coreutils
cpio
cxxlibs
dcron
devs
dhcpd
diffutils
e2fsprogs
elvis
etc
findutils
gawk
glibc-solibs
glibc-zoneinfo
grep
groff
gzip
hdparm
hotplug
infozip
iptables
kbd
kernel-modules
less
lilo
links
logrotate
lsof
lvm
mc
mkinitrd
module-init-tools
openssl-solibs
pciutils
pkgtools
procps
reiserfsprogs
sed
shadow
slocate
sysklogd
syslinux
sysvinit
tar
tcpip
udev
usbutils
utempter
util-linux
wget
xfsprogs

They don't really depend on anything. They will work by themselves, although you need to configure their respecitive config files.

That's a loaded question. What filesystem do you use? What bootloader? This really isn't a long list of packages, and won't take up much disk space. You really need to weed through this list yourself, or just leave them; they won't take up that much space. Most of this stuff, however, you need (tcpip, sysklogd, and many others) or should probably keep around anyway (sed, gawk, etc.).

if you want to display images you might
want to install their libs (libjpeg, libpng, etc)
and utilities (such as imagemagick)

maybe also crypt, db and ssl stuff...

I use XFS filesystem, and the LILO bootloader. I don't really need to display any images, this box is only a web server machine, though it might turn into an FTP server as well. I have a full install of Slack and Dropline Gnome on my main rig for development.

I figured the list I installed was fairly minimal, and couldn't see any real room to shrink it further. But more input is always welcome. Thanks for the replies!

You could definitely shrink it a bit further, but with drive space being so cheap, my question is "why?". I have a much more minimal system to serve some pics of my wife and kids to family members, and a default install saved me a lot of headaches. For instance: when I decided to use gallery to display my photos on my website, it needed imagemagick, which came with my default slack install.

If you know exactly what you will do, and/or don't mind chasing things down later as you need them, then you could slim it down a little more, but not much.

My advice--stick with what 'ya got.