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Custom Distro

general

Just for fun: can anyone tell me the packages needed to take a small debian or slackware install and give it the following services:

appache

x windows

vnc

KDE or Gnome - whichever HAS to be there for GUI

pure ftpd

im trying to see how small a server i can get that can serve websites, ftp and still have a functional GUI.

any help would be appreciated

2 Replies

Linode Staff

You should check out "debootstrap" –

> debootstrap is used to create a Debian base system from scratch, without requiring the availability of dpkg or apt. It does this by downloading .deb files from a mirror site, and carefully unpacking them into a directory which can eventually be chrooted into.
-Chris

For the smallest possible system a distro is not going to help you. You need to build the system from scratch with just the stuff you need. If you want to try it, look here:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

I've just started looking into doing this myself as RedHat puts too much crap in their distro I just don't want! My current RedHat 9.0 linode uses almost 10MB of memory for each apache process! I have a feeling I can get that down to a more useful number doing thing myself and leaving out pieces of apache I don't need (like WebDAV). If it works, I won't have to upgrade to a linode 128. Yay! (Sorry Chris, I love the service but I'd rather spend my money on beer instead of an upgrade to a 128MB linode.)

–James

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