minimal Fedora install?

[Ron Goulard]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:45:45 -0400, linux r wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I was given a pentium something or other box over the weekend and I want
> to install Fedora on.  It only has like 24 megs of <proprietary> ram. If
> there is such a thing as a pci ram card maybe it might merit throwing it
> in there.
> 
> I would be interested to knowing who out there has loaded FC
> successfully on a really old machine, what you did to overcome problems,
> etc.  Cruddiest hardware contest!   :)  At what point does the camels
> back break with regards to cruddy hardware?
> 
> I can upgrade the hard drive (which is only 1g at this point).  It'd be
> kinda cool to get FC on it and not have to go to a 'tiny' distro.
> Resources:  floppy drive, no cdrom, pci slots.

1G is plenty for a minimal install of FC1.  Just be sure to install any
additional rpms that you want/need.

I've got FC1 running from a 256M CF card (actual space taken up is about
160M- small enough to fit, which was my only goal).  While the hardware
isn't that old (it's a mini-itx motherboard), it's got everything I need
on it, which is, Apache, dhcpd, iptables, htb-init, php, sendmail (for
sending, not receiving), etc. I have several machines running like this as
a matter of fact. The advantage for me was a very small unit, silent, very
low power (~16W according to the spec sheets) and no moving parts.

What I did was install everything I wanted to a regular hard drive, then
strip out any rpms I didn't want.  When that wasn't small enough, I rm'd
stuff which I was certain I wasn't going to need (yes, there was some
level of trial and error here, and yes, it's an ugly way of doing it but
it was late and I was getting tired). Once I got it down to where it would
easily fit onto the CF card, I simply tarred it up to another machine (tar
cf - / -X /root/xclude.txt | ssh ip.add.res.s "cat > file.tar").

>From there, I just untar'd it to the cf card and used grub-install.  Once
I proved to myself that I had it working, I did a dd of the card, so now
restoring and/or putting out other similar machines is just a matter of
using dd on a cf card in my laptop.  From power-on to login prompt is
about 34s and the cf card runs as read-only, as all logging goes to a
central server over stunnel.

I'm planning to use rsync over ssh to keep these machines updated, but
that's not finished yet.  Right now, it's a one at a time, manual process.

There are many ways of doing the same, but this is the way that worked for
me, since each of the machines use the exact same hardware.

Not sure if this is the kind of info you were looking for, but Fedora Core
can be done with a very minimal footprint for a little bit of work.

Ron