neko wrote: ↑10 Nov 2020, 07:16
@cad
Would you upload your minimum Porteus 4.0 ISO for us?
It would be a lot of work to do so because when making my minimalistic Porteus 4.0 i586 LXDE did not have in mind sharing it, so it is highly personalized with data that would be inappropriate to share.
But I can tell you exactly how it was made so you can easily duplicate it if you wish so.
First of all, the biggest gain was made by compiling machine-specific kernels for my computers and individual needs. I don't know if it's relevant, but, I did not use the Porteus patch provided in crippled-sources.xzm. I did not know it was there until a couple of days ago. I had downloaded the AUFS4.16-patch package from the aufs developer's github and patched the 4.16.3 kernel using base, loopback and mmap (not standalone, as the developer thinks it unnecessary when aufs is not compiled as a module). My vmlinuzes came out from 2125 KB to 2175 KB in size and the 000-kernel.xzm module, as a consequence of building lean, machine-specific kernels, was reduced from about 50 MB to 2.7 MB - 2.8 MB in size. As I said, this is a huge step toward making the latest Porteus 32-bit go fast on old hardware. If you want to go this route, you need to compile a kernel that is highly specific to your computer. My kernels, having been tailored specifically to my laptops, probably would not even boot on other, dissimilar systems. The laptops I use are diskless, and I like to boot from cdrom and run the systems in RAM (copy2ram cheatcode).
As far as the other main modules:
001-core.xzm was reduced by taking out the following programs with:
Code: Select all
ROOT=001-core removepkg <package name>
bridge-utils, cifs-utils, dnsmasq, groff, httpfs2, intel-microcode, iucode-tool, man, nfs-utils, perl, python, reiserfsprogs, rpcbind, rsync, samba, sudo, telnet, webfs, xfsdump, xfsprogs.
Here, I also made two symlinks that were missing (libldap.so and liblber.so) to /usr/lib/libldap-2.4.so.2.10.8 and /usr/lib/liblber-2.4.so.2.10.8. These symlinks proved essential for compiling and running claws-mail (email client) and libetpan. I have already reported this bug in the Bug Reports section yesterday.
002-xorg.xzm was left untouched - I did not want to mess up the various libraries. Though, I would not mind if someone knowledgeable could advise which libraries in there could be safely parted with, given my current setup.
In 003-lxde.xzm got rid of poppler-data and poppler-0.63.0 (poppler-0.63.0 was replaced with poppler-0.64.0 - long, irrelevant story, don't ask me why - poppler-0.63.0 would have worked just fine). I also added mtpaint-3.40 (extracting it from Porteus 3.1 i586 XFCE), added some highly personalized wallpapers and modified lxpanel to customize my desktop.
I made an extra module for claws-mail-3.17.4 inclusive of related programs to support a few claws-mail plugins (libetpan-1.9.3, dillo-3.0.5 webbrowser, fltk-1.3.5). And also a separate module for Firefox. These systems were tested and work flawlessly. I am writing this from one of them and it is a joy to watch this old laptop operate so efficiently with an up-to-date operating system. Not one hiccup.
Note: libetpan-1.9.3 compiled with a huge amount of warnings - never seen that many warnings compiling a program - but worked just fine in the end. I had tried compiling a more recent version of libetpan, but it did not work out. The other programs compiled just fine, and were compiled within my minimalistic Porteus (temporarily activating 05-devel.xzm for this purpose).
That's about it, off the top of my head. All together, the ISO is about 245 MB in size.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions on reducing the size of 002-xorg.xzm - which libraries are unneeded in this setup and can be gotten rid of.
Thank you.
It's such a low-cost great little program!
