[aklug] minimalist ubuntu

For those of us with a minimalist bent, I found a 'minimalist' installation CD for ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD

This morning I did the easy basic installation into a virtualbox vm, and most of the
stuff that should have been optional (or additive) in the desktop and alternate install
is not in fact installed with the minimal install, although there is a lot of residual
flotsam left over. For example there's a lot of leftover gnome and ooffice crap, even
though gnome or ooffice themselves are not installed. Man pages are installed, as is
bind9 and dhcp3 (I can sort of understand dhcp3, but bind?? Additive yes. Mandatory why?).

Total space used after an apt-get clean:

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--minimal-root
                      3.3G 623M 2.5G 20% /
tmpfs 188M 0 188M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 188M 40K 188M 1% /var/run
varlock 188M 0 188M 0% /var/lock
udev 188M 2.6M 186M 2% /dev
tmpfs 188M 0 188M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 188M 2.0M 186M 2% /lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/volatile
/dev/sda5 236M 19M 206M 9% /boot
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--minimal-home
                      8.0G 147M 7.4G 2% /home

Lots and lots more packages I'd consider 'optional', or 'additive', although I haven't
figured out yet how to determine if they are dependencies for something else that is
also installed.

apt-cache unmet gives several screens of unmet dependencies...my inclination would be to
purge the dependent package, but I can see that might be dangerous to do wholesale.

Of course, I could be completely misunderstanding what apt-* is telling me. First day
and all that.

Anyway, seems like this 'minimal install' might be a good place to start making boxes;
it's always been my thought to start with the minimum framework and add on what you
want, rather than the bloatware path of installing EverDamTing. That's what used to be
nice about gentoo (although even they insisted from day one that man and pam and some
others were mandantory and required for all installations, rather than a Really Good
Idea but leaving it to the installer's choice).

So this is just my first day or two of diving into ubuntu in any depth; I'm working on
it and got lots to learn. I did find out (surprisingly) that I think I like what gnome
has turned into for a user interface, just a shame you've got to install
EveryOtherDamnThing to get just the UI.

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Received on Thu Mar 19 20:57:28 2009