Pondering a mid-size grml

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Newsgroups: gmane.linux.distributions.grml.user
Date: 2007-02-13

> I'm playing around with adding things to grml_small (being that stipping
> the big one down seems rather intimidating)

Stripping the big one down works fairly well (in my opinion better than adding things to grml_small because you might add newer/untested versions accidentally) and even without network connection.

Just take dpkg —get-selections, and set everything to purge which is not listed in the grml-small-selections file. Keep the following packages as well (since packages on grml-small are named differently for these):

linux-image-2.6.18-grml                        install
grml-policyrcd                                 install
locales                                        install
unionfs-modules-2.6.18-grml                    install
unionfs-tools                                  install
unionfs-utils                                  install
policyrcd-script-zg2                           install

Run apt-get dselect-upgrade and after some time you will have a smaller system. Keep more packages to get a bigger cd image.

From one of my scripts for a similar purpose:

export LANG=C
export LC_MESSAGES=
mv /etc/apt/sources.list{,-moved}
touch /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
dpkg --get-selections | sed s/install$/purge/ | dpkg --set-selections
dpkg --set-selections <grml-small-0.3-selections
dpkg --set-selections <my-selections
apt-get -y dselect-upgrade
apt-get -f install
apt-get dselect-upgrade

Michael Schierl

Pondering a mid-size grml

So I have played around with this script for a while; I am trying to keep X, so my 'my-selections' looks like this:

linux-image-2.6.18-grml         install
unionfs-modules-2.6.18-grml     install
grml-policyrcd                  install
policyrcd-script-zg2            install
locales                         install
man-db                          install
fluxbox                         install
grml-x                          install
hwinfo                          install
libhal1                         install
libhd13                         install
pciutils                        install
xbase-clients                   install
xfonts-base                     install
xserver-xorg                    install
xserver-xorg-core               install
xserver-xorg-input-all          install
xserver-xorg-input-evdev        install
xserver-xorg-input-kbd          install
xserver-xorg-input-mouse        install
xserver-xorg-input-synaptics    install
xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse      install
xserver-xorg-input-wacom        install
xserver-xorg-video-fbdev        install
xserver-xorg-video-vesa         install
xterm                           install

The first 'apt-get -y dselect-upgrade' runs fine and leaves everything related to X alone.

The second one, though, wants to remove everything that looks remotely like X:

apt-get -y dselect-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  grml-x xkb-data* xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all
  xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse
  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-vmmouse
  xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-vesa
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 12 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 15.6MB disk space will be freed.

What am I missing there? Do I have to put the whole dependency tree for those packages into my selection file?

Maybe it would be easier to strip grml down to the minimum packages you mentioned and then go using aptitude or apt-get…

Juergen Fiedler