I've put a little time into generating a hyper small footprint linaro headless image. From UDS the two sizes to try and fit into as I understand are 64M and 128M installed. So with that in mind, via live helper I created a headless image where none of the recommended packages were installed. This brings the installed size of the root fs down to 165Meg installed (excluding hwpacks)

With a little script-foo which I've created to be part of the live-helper build I can get the rootfs installed size down to 82,240,000. This is without turning to the usual things to slim things down like busybox as well as without going through /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/lib /lib and pulling out specific function that isn't needed.

What I have done is gone after the low hanging fruit. That is i18n locales, documentation, zoneinfo, charmaps and some X11 & firefox things that obviously aren't needed since those things aren't installed in headless anyway. All of that gets us down to `125Meg. To get the next approx 40Meg I have to take out /var/lib/dpkg and /var/lib/apt. This could make a certain amount of sense for a demo system running on out NAND flash. This is somewhat problematic however in so much if you want to use linaro-media-create with hwpacks, well you need apt to work and that comes with the as mentioned 40 Meg price tag.

Anyway this seemed to be a good Friday night over a beverage type of hack to gain a little data just to see the effort required.

All in all I do think this is a reasonable approach to get to a "nano" sized system that would fit into flash. To get that last mile tho, I think we'd need to turn to busybox, audit the libs and binaries, adjust the kernel build such that modules are kept to a minimum and only function actually needed is built in the kernel as well as working out the last bit of install via something linaro-media-create-like so that one could at least get things onto an SD card without too much hackery for test yet not gain the full 123 meg noted below.

Raw Data: --------------

du of the 82 Meg system, hwpack not yet installed 4 ./proc 4 ./home 4 ./sys 9784 ./lib 3364 ./sbin 4 ./selinux 12 ./dev 4 ./srv 12 ./root 928 ./var 4 ./tmp 3688 ./bin 61456 ./usr 4 ./opt 2260 ./etc 4 ./mnt 4 ./boot 4 ./media 82240

du of the 125 Meg system (without /var/lib/apt and /var/lib/dpkg chopped out) hwpack not installed yet 4 ./proc 4 ./home 4 ./sys 9784 ./lib 3364 ./sbin 4 ./selinux 12 ./dev 4 ./srv 12 ./root 44064 ./var 4 ./tmp 3688 ./bin 61456 ./usr 4 ./opt 2260 ./etc 4 ./mnt 4 ./boot 4 ./media 125376 .

du of installed system (based on the 125Meg image) after hwpack installed and system is booted 4 ./home 4 ./opt 4 ./srv 4 ./mnt 65312 ./usr <--- grew by 4 Meg 3764 ./bin 3444 ./sbin 16 ./root 4 ./tmp 75816 ./var <-- var is ~31 Meg larger after hwpack install!! 4 ./selinux 0 ./sys 4 ./media 2276 ./etc 86524 ./lib <-- lib after hwpack install is ~79 Meg larger!! 10400 ./boot <-- grew by 10 Meg 188 ./dev 16 ./lost+found 0 ./proc 248484 . <-- grew by ~123Meg

For those interested in following in my footsteps, my live helper maverick config is located in here:

lp:~tom-gall/linaro/live-helper.config.maverick.headless-nano

du of original 165 Meg headless image without recommended packages. 4 ./proc 4 ./home 4 ./sys 852 ./lib/udev 4 ./lib/firmware 508 ./lib/security 148 ./lib/plymouth 200 ./lib/terminfo 40 ./lib/init 4 ./lib/modules 16 ./lib/lsb 9784 ./lib 3364 ./sbin 4 ./selinux 4 ./dev/pts 4 ./dev/shm 12 ./dev 4 ./srv 12 ./root 16 ./var/spool 4 ./var/lock 4 ./var/mail 12 ./var/log 43392 ./var/lib 4 ./var/run 4 ./var/tmp 4 ./var/opt 4 ./var/backups 612 ./var/cache 4 ./var/local 44064 ./var 4 ./tmp 3688 ./bin 34604 ./usr/lib 1580 ./usr/sbin 54756 ./usr/share 4 ./usr/games 4 ./usr/src 10260 ./usr/bin 40 ./usr/include 56 ./usr/local 101308 ./usr 4 ./opt 20 ./etc/udev 64 ./etc/pam.d 8 ./etc/rc5.d 8 ./etc/cron.monthly 36 ./etc/cron.daily 8 ./etc/rc4.d 4 ./etc/profile.d 8 ./etc/rsyslog.d 144 ./etc/console-setup 16 ./etc/skel 68 ./etc/initramfs-tools 8 ./etc/cron.hourly 28 ./etc/modprobe.d 56 ./etc/apt 48 ./etc/security 48 ./etc/default 20 ./etc/apparmor.d 8 ./etc/rc3.d 12 ./etc/kbd 8 ./etc/X11 664 ./etc/ssl 8 ./etc/insserv 4 ./etc/insserv.conf.d 8 ./etc/cron.d 16 ./etc/bash_completion.d 8 ./etc/alternatives 24 ./etc/sysctl.d 32 ./etc/dhcp3 12 ./etc/ld.so.conf.d 28 ./etc/iproute2 12 ./etc/apparmor 8 ./etc/terminfo 16 ./etc/update-motd.d 24 ./etc/dpkg 8 ./etc/rcS.d 4 ./etc/lsb-base 12 ./etc/firefox 8 ./etc/sudoers.d 172 ./etc/init 4 ./etc/opt 8 ./etc/ca-certificates 8 ./etc/rc1.d 36 ./etc/network 8 ./etc/python 8 ./etc/linaro 8 ./etc/rc6.d 8 ./etc/ldap 16 ./etc/logrotate.d 16 ./etc/logcheck 20 ./etc/kernel 8 ./etc/depmod.d 108 ./etc/init.d 8 ./etc/rc0.d 12 ./etc/vim 8 ./etc/rc2.d 8 ./etc/python2.6 12 ./etc/dbus-1 8 ./etc/cron.weekly 2280 ./etc 4 ./mnt 4 ./boot 4 ./media 165248 .

Regards, Tom