stripping slack down or a smaller slack or what packages can I remove
 

ok to make slackware as useful as posable pat included a whole bunch of stuff that most people will never need
I think I could run an ISP with just what's included in slackware
so
I don't need a
DNS server
DHCP server
bridg I can't see any use for this
development
do I really need
both a java to C converter and a java compiler
ada compiler
lisp compiler
KDE
all of kde-i18n* is gone

can anybody think of anything else I could remove from a full slackware install

webserver,mysql,ssh,telnet,squid,fetchmail,ftp server ....

Install in expert mode and select package series A,AP,K,L and N. From the individual lists, uncheck everything about which you know you don't need it and go on from that.

ok this is the how BUT I was asking what do I leave out

BTW I love your user name

That's the real question -- what do you need, and what don't you? There are a lot of packages, many of which are dependencies for many other applications. Honestly there's not a lot you can do to short-cut this learning process. Take a look at a package you don't think you need (for example, DNS), and figure out what packages it depends on. Figure out if other programs use those packages, et cetera. Move on down through your list.

There was a guide around here somewhere for a completely stripped-down version of Slackware, but that's a bit more zealous than what you're thinking about. However, do some searching and you may find that his techniques and experience may help you in your goal, too.

well I'm not a newbie
I've squeezed slack on to some small hard disks slack 3.5 on a 200 Mb HDD and could still install software from source
I'm asking here hoping you guys would know more than me

Your 200MB system with pkgtools is about as small as you can get with normal packages. To get much smaller you have to start making shortcuts like removing docs, headers and static libs, or leaving out some pretty basic sruff. I spent years working with very minimal installs and used to keep a webpage about it. To get smaller than about 200-240MB (with some X) you have to really get stingy and either be non-GPL or non-POSIX about things. Of course, you can get lots smaller, but only if you know exactly what you want the machine to do and that list is not too long. One tool that can help you is called slackdeptrack. It's a perl script which ldd's everything on your system and lists the packages that each package depends on. It can help you find a few more that can be removed.
It is a wonderful way to learn more about your system. I think there is a howto on the slackware wiki here, and there have been lots of threads on the subject, but none of them are really thorough about the subject. It is impossible to give definitive answers beacuse it depends entirely on exactly what you want and don't want. As PatV says, Have Fun!

I just downloaded slackdeptrack and a slackbuild for Slackware 12.1 from slacky.eu, it built fine and the usage is really easy.

Using this you would be able to strip a system to the bone, for example I have just been through the letter "a" packages and you would be able to remove without upsetting dependencies on other packages the following, however you would have to be careful as removing some of them would reduce the functionality of Slackware.

a2ps
acct
acpid *
alpine
amarok
anthy
apmd *
appres
ash
at *
audacious
audacious-plugins
aumix
autoconf *
autofs *
automake *

Anything with a "*" I would seriously consider more than once before removing, but as far as I can see removing those packages would not break other packages.

PLEASE CHECK FOR YOURSELF BEFORE DOING ANYTHING THAT COULD BREAK YOUR SYSTEM.

samac

this is better information than I was asking for
thank you

I used to have docs and distribute several cut-down versions with the best/smallest minimum at around 42MB. That one contained just the stuff needed to boot with(study the full initscripts to understand just what is needed for that), plus the pkgtools & Co. to be able to extend the thing as wanted. Add couple of extra network packages and you could, in theory, have a bootbale normally installed system which could then be extended as wanted over the net.

The common wisdom is 'just install series, a, ap, l, and n', but that is way over twice as many packages as you really need. IIRC, the 42MB installation contained 40-50 packages total. Another tip, you'll sooner arrive at a realistic minimum by starting from zero and working up, than by starting with a full install and working down. If you have qemu, you could always install onto a partition image and easily reboot it in qemu to see how far it progresses before running out of steam.
Just think about what happens when the machine boots and follow that line -you will need aaa_base and etc for the dirs and con files, then lilo to boot with, the kernel and (optionally) mods, then sysvinit. Then, start reading the init scripts starting with rc.S and follow through to the end. I used the loose criteria that a minimal system is one which would boot normally on normal with no non-essential services and that would be extensible. Even with the 'bloat' of the current slackware, this should still be possible in around 50MB -using static devs instead of udev/hal, you might be able to do this with about 45MB. If you cut out headers, static libs, docs and man-pages you'll save a bit -but I considered that cheating.
Another good guide, is to have a look at the contents of zipslack (11.0 was the last available). But, even zipslack was close to 100MB, but also much more ready for whatever direction you might want to go with it.
Very educational exercise working up from nothing -will teach you a lot that you might never find out, otherwise.

One thing continues to puzzle me....

A lot of Slackware documentation and folklore seems to recommend installing more and then removing unwanted pieces. To me, the Arch approach has always seemed more logical---you add only what you need. (I'm not pitching Arch--in fact, it's falling out of favor due to some annoying bugs.)

What would be wrong with installing Slackware from the bottom up? Perhaps someone has already set up a spinoff that starts small??

Slackware operates totally differently than Arch. Its not supposed to be a rolling release distribution. Its designed to operate as a single DVD distribution. That has advantages and disadvantages. Mostly depending on users needs.

I would think these would be separate and independent issues. ie--why it not possible to have a bare-bones Slackware installation CD, while still keeping the other attributes?

inertia... People always recommend to install *everything* and then remove what you don't want, because that is the easy way to answer the question. But, it is no more reliable nor less risky than telling someone to do it the other way around. Even if you start with everything, all you have to do is remove *one* wrong package and you get an unbootable system. And if you do it by starting with everything, when you finally get it cut down to what you think is an acceptable minimum, you don't know any more about what you need or when, where and why you need it.
In fact, you'll find out just what the minimum is for your purposes much faster by starting with just a very, very few packages and working up from there. Doing it the other way, one will go through and remove 10, 50 or 100 packages at once. Then when something is missing, you have to re-install all of them(be sure to keep a list!) and then remove *less* from that list and see if that doesn't break your system.
Thinking about it a little will tell you why I stopped trying to keep any sort of HOWTO on the subject -just add in the variety of what people want from their 'minimal' system and you'll see there is no end to the complexity. Some people's minimal system is with 'just compiz and the most basic 200-300 video codecs'!
No, I wouldn't go back to trying to list packages for anyone -even if they gave me a very specific set of purposes. I did all that for myself and learned what I needed to know, and I wouldn't want to deny anyone else their chance to learn all that.
I worked minimal systems top-to-bottom thank, you. I once made a floppy with three complete distros on it. Each of the three had its' own kernel -just above 250KB for each, mind you. And each had its' single executable which would run when booted.

Because, you see a real minimum can be achieved with just a kernel, and a filesystem which consists of two directories, one or two device nodes and a single executable with a single link to it! To elaborate, you pretty much need two dirs, /dev and /sbin(or /etc). You need a device /dev/console because the kernel demands it, and you'll probably want to see some output from your tiny distro so you can be sure it really did something. Then you need /sbin/init or /etc/init, But this can be a link to the single executable 'linuxrc' which is a statically-compiled executable. It can do anything you like, but to keep thing small, you might just have a printf procedure there which would print out a single word or phrase. That's it, your comlete distro in less than 300KB! I prefer the single-word variety so that you need to boot each of the tiny distros in order to form a sentence...

I've never tried Zenwalk - maybe they start that way? Would fit into their concept.

I kind of fake it via the expert install.

I switch off everything I don't want or don't need or install by myself anyway (Vim, Gimp & Firefox for example). But it's not the same packages as for a minimal install, so I choose via expert install and disable many packages.

Then follows the update-and-patch session for my "beautiful fonts in Slackware" stuff, a kernel better suited for my needs and my favorite applications and programming languages I prefer most recent. I also don't install anything SMTP or DNS related, because I use the DJB stuff. (Which thanks to the licence change would make a very nice addition to Slackware - just to mention it... :) )

After that, I add several packages from slacky.eu (with swaret) I'm too lazy to do myself.

Essentially, I install a notebook-doing much GUI and pixel-Internet everywhere-base system and add everything else selectively afterwards.

Sadly, after a few weeks I totally lose the discipline of wrapping new stuff into a package and just do make installs.

Thankfully, Slackware's stability is very mess-tolerant.

I would like a bare bone install CD very much.