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No, I was thinking of using the current ubuntu packages while using a reduction method (in a rewritten tazpkg and tazpanel) that gets rid of the excess the packages install that can't/won't be used anyway (doc, man and other weird directories ubuntu throws in), much like debootstrap and multistrap does it. The binaries won't be smaller, but the size the installed package takes up will be.
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>I was thinking of using the current ubuntu packages
Hello, Puppy!
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Puppy can only use a handful of Debian packages and the process to install is slow. Dare I even mention the other Puppies born from Woof? Like slackware and even archlinux based?
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Trixar_za I don't see a problem with what you are suggesting at all.
Work on the base OS and use someone else's repository.
But please not ubuntu.
Sadly it's grown as bloated as windows.
I like slitaz for its small size and still acting like a normal linux distro that encourages you to compile your own apps.
Every mini distro seems to be a frugal install that makes it damn hard to customize with non-packaged apps and it keeps me away from them.
my distro of choice has been pclinuxos.
they also have great remastering & live thumbdrive tools.
There was once a mini distro called Tinyme that used it's repositories that i used on really old hardware and worked rather well on p2 laptops I had.
might be something to look at.
They are against systemd which while i admit I don't know everything about looks like a bad idea to me.
Personally though, i don't care what Slitaz is based off as long as it still feels like slitaz and remains snappy.
If I need a linux for an old p2 PC i'll grab a slitaz 3 image or antix.
Any PC with at least 512mb of ram will run most lxde or openbox distro's well enough if you turn off unneeded services.
so would slitaz if based off prettymuch any distro.
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Hello, sorry if I intrude in your conversation, but I couldn't help it.
The fact is, I guess I know what the "Key Master" is talking about, so _if_ we had the same idea, maybe we could work it together and save some time.
I had such idea, but still didn't complete it, since you know it's just an hobby I can work on it only few hours in the weekend.
To make it short, I didn't find the distro I need, so I'm going to modify another one.
The first candidate was Slitaz, but ok.
The second candidate is a lightweight distro based on ubuntu, don't say the name but we all know what I'm talking about.
They have those self containing squashfs files .sce, which they build runtime importing directly from ubuntu repos.
Then you can mount them as loops, saving lots of RAM.
Dark note, the sce files contain all, really all, the dependencies needed for that application to run, plus lots of not needed stuffs.
The core is ver 3.16, ~4MBytes, and the initram is really decent, ~11MBytes.
But lets see some .sce example, build-essential.sce 89MB, firefox.sce 92MB, leafpad.sce 23MB, pcmanfm.sce 29MB, xorg-vesa.sce 52MB, lxde.sce 80MB, wireless.sce 42MB, plus other small utils, it gets a total disk space used of 600MB.
It's big, but we are talking about bleeding edge versions.
So I did a test, I was hoping the whole stuffs was full of redundant libs and stuffs, so I expanded all in 1 single ext3 partition.
Yes gets smaller, but unfortunately the whole stuffs all together is still in the order of the 500MB, which is not usable on low ram PC.
So, to save some space, I decided, for what I need openbox, lxde? I'm ok with a less features desktop manager: fluxbox, just 13MB all together, it's doing everything just with its RootMenu on the taskbar, total ram used 300MB, a blast :-)
But still, a very big problem remains, the huge libs dependencies brought inside from ubuntu repos.
Than I had such idea: why just don't take the first .deb of any application I need, run the binary, and it will tell me exactly what libs it needs, then I'll add them one by one, till it runs.
Yes, that takes some time, but at the end, I "suspect" the application will run with less than half of the libs imported from ubuntu repos.
I say "suspect" because that part I still didn't try - sorry.
Also another big issue: enormous fonts!
Those bleeding edge applications are built on gtk3, I googled around and I couldn't find some common way to lower those gtk3 fonts themes all together - sorry
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The size depends a lot on compilation switch -O.
As an example an app I wrote in C++ gives a binary of 374496 bytes when compiled with g++ and no -O switch, and only 128725 bytes with -Os! (And by stripping symbols you can reduce this even more, down to 89896 bytes in my example.)
About finding dependencies, are you sure running the binary will tell you which libs it needs? I thought ld only listed missing symbols. But doesn't the deb package differentiate between required and recommended deps?
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Hi llev,
It is interesting to compare too: size of the package contain optimized (for size) and un-optimized binaries.
I installed SliTaz to separate HDD partition, and my machine has 1GB of RAM, and packages size really no matters. It is interesting personally for me to have packages optimized for speed. Especially, optimized for Intel Atom N270 
But I understand really, — it is overhead for my SliTaz hobby.
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Really, I'm not sure about nothing, those what I said last, I still have to try it, finding some free time between my job, my children and my car needs :-)
Sure what you say is absolutely right.
But for the time being, I don't care much about the compilation switches, and because I don't compile them, they are binaries already, and because my "hope" is to cut in the _number_ of dependent libs, not their size.
If a binary is big, but I can cut away few of those dependent/recommended libs bloating in the .deb, I'm still ok with that.
Because that saves me the mess of compilations and, once I know the libs I only need, I can switch to the next debian/ubuntu kernel easily, just digging out what I need from the next .deb
That is my idea, as I said, _if_ it matches with any of yours, we can work it out together, if not, sorry for the intrusion ;-)
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trixar, you might have a look at this discussion:
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,18304.0.html
it seems to me that guy is doing what you were trying to suggest here,is it YOU over there....? ;-)
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No, but guys like me exist everywhere. The crazy risk-taking ideas types. I've tried it and ended up with a 417Mb mess of an ISO. I'm back to working with Buildroot again. For a distro build system it uses less bandwidth than trying to construct a distro using Ubuntu packages.
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Looks the crazy-risk-taking-ideas is a big tribe :-)
He claims to have packed xorg+desktop manager+pcmanfm+leafpad+wireless full+sound+web browser+whatever else in only what was it, a hundreds megabytes?
Seems to me even more than what you packed in Slitaz.
I'm monitoring that discussion, if any news will keep you posted ;-)
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Only with the Kernel and Xorg - the rest is stripped and size optimized packages from TinyCore. Puppy's Woof takes a similiar route, but comes with several binaries already to avoid some me the larger extra packages Ubuntu can pull with it.
Ubuntu is a collection of several big packages. Even without Mono, it still grabs two versions of python, tcl/tk and perl (with several large libraries) to make it's magic work. Ubuntu is kind me a dependancy hell.
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sed 's/ me / of /g'
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Predictive text - keeps confusing of with me.
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news from the crazy-risk-taking-ideas tribe! :-)
it looks the person didn't get along with the administrators there, but he claims to have packed all in 67MB, using only ubuntu debs.
I could try to contact the person, ask if he wants to come here and join our tribe... ;-)
What do you think trixar?
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