Re: 100 meg disk
> hi
>
> i recently installed slink on a compaq 486 laptop w/ 4 megs ram and a 100
> meg hdd. dselect downloaded a _few_ packages for me, but during the
> installation process the disk became full. i tried using dselect to
> remove unwanted packages but it doesn't work beyond the first menu
> anymore. when i try to get to 'select' it returns "dselect: failed to
> write status record about 'lib-apache-mode-auth-sys' to
> '/var/log/dpkg/status': No space left on device"
>
> this sucks
>
> i've tried w/out success to find the place where all the stuff dselect
> downloaded is stored so i could just remove it and start again.
>
> i'm thinking about reinstalling
>
> any less drastic solutions?
Well, I personally would try to kill stuff in the /var/lib/dpkg
directory, and see if you can clean up some space. If this doesn't
work, go for the reinstall.
On the other hand, depending on how well you know what you're doing, it
might be good to go for a reinstall. Are you absolutely shure you have
installed the absolute minimum packages you need?
Personally, with such cramped quarters, I would first try to install the
very very basic packages first, trim some fat off them manually, and
then go bit by bit installing any other packages I needed. ('Very very
basic' means try to install as little as dselect lets you get away
with.)
For the record, I've installed Hamm on a 160-176 MB (can't remember well)
partition on a 24 MB Toshiba 486 laptop. I managed to get in TeX,
LaTeX, Emacs 19, AUC TeX, XFree, Ghostscript, Ghostview, FVWM2, and
Python 1.5.1 on it, with still about 30 MB free. When I got all that
installed, I only had about 10 MB free; I freed 20 more by gzipping and
deleting unessential files installed by packages, and compressing
executables with gzexe. The /uxr/X11R6 tree, the /usr/doc tree, and the
emacs etc/ directory tend to have a lot of bloat in them, so you can get
rid of quite an amount of stuff on them. For not too frequently used
executables, the gzexe program can also reclaim some space (don't use it
on frequently used executables, since you will need disk space to
decompress them when you're using them).
However, if I were you, I'd give serious thought to a miniature
distribution. These are more difficult to set up, but you can surely
get them into smaller spaces. I fear that if you're not very
comfortable with Linux, this won't be for you. If you want to check
small distros, try this link:
http://www.kernelnotes.org/dist-index.html
and look for the "Hobby/Hacker Distributions" section.
Personally, I've thought of setting up NoMad Linux on my laptop; the
base system is 10.5 MB only, and the package system is nice for the
size. However, right now I haven't had the time for this. It would
involve setting up a development system on a partition on a desktop to
handle compilation/package building, and building small packages for any
software I want on my laptop. Basically, brewing your own distribution.
Maybe someone should make such a distribution: "Laptop micro Linux". Oh
well, I'll give it a shot someday :-)
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