zlinw@mcmedia.com.au writes:
A complete new install from the net downloads something like 3 gig of packages, a figure I consider to be to high (I am being very provincial here :-)).
You must install a lot more crap than me :-) Showing off time! Here's what I downloaded: # du -sh /var/tmp/live/var/cache/apt/archives/ 70M /var/tmp/live/var/cache/apt/archives/ And here's the finished product: # du -sch /var/tmp/live/boot/{vmlinuz-*,initrd.img-*,filesystem.squashfs} 2.4M /var/tmp/live/boot/vmlinuz-3.8-1-amd64 8.1M /var/tmp/live/boot/initrd.img-3.8-1-amd64 40M /var/tmp/live/boot/filesystem.squashfs 50M total That's wheezy with the kernel cherry-picked from unstable, configured to work as an appliance, like your ADSL modem. And over 60% is the kernel; with a localyesconfig kernel I get a total size of 23MiB. A minimal install from debian-installer will be the cost of d-i and udebs (up to about 120MiB) plus about another 100MiB or so for Essential and Priority: standard packages. These days I think you'll need to boot with priority=low ("expert") or possibly pass desktop=none, or it will default to installing the GNOME environment (which is rather big). I'm nearly 100% sure you can pass desktop=lxde or xfce to get a smaller default install that still has a GUI, though last time I measured that, it was still over 1GiB unpacked... Let's run some numbers (starting from the 70MB base install above)... (live)# apt-get install xorg task-xfce-desktop --no-install-recommends <<< no | grep -A1 Need.to.get Need to get 120 MB of archives. After this operation, 360 MB of additional disk space will be used. (live)# apt-get install xorg task-xfce-desktop --install-recommends <<< no | grep -A1 Need.to.get Need to get 609 MB of archives. After this operation, 1922 MB of additional disk space will be used. Making a little table, w/recommends wo/recommends dl/install dl/install task-lxde-desktop 540/1666 MB 104/305 MB task-xfce-desktop 609/1922 MB 120/360 MB task-gnome-desktop 852/2584 MB 373/1120 MB task-kde-desktop 866/2478 MB 352/989 MB A GUI base install in the worst case should be around 1GiB to download and nearly 3GiB of desktop, by my reckoning. I grant you that's still pretty horrible, especially if you're intending to do >>1.