[Techtalk] how small will Gentoo go?

[Julie Bovee Hill]

Hi Carla,

On 11/6/06, Carla Schroder wrote:
> hey all,
>
> How small can you make a Gentoo installation? I want to roll my own
> firewall/WAP/router Linux, and I want it to be as small as possible, and to
> be easily customizable and upgradeable. Which sounds like Gentoo. Pyramid
> Linux, Pebble, and other WAP Linuxes weigh in from 50-128 megabytes. How does
> Gentoo compare? Here's a sample feature list:

I love to evangelize about Gentoo, but in this case I think a basic
Gentoo install probably won't work for you because the Gentoo Portage
application disk space requirements and the space needed for all of
the application source files and compiling is significant even if you
pare the installed applications down to a minimum. From the Gentoo
Handbook: "the Portage tree alone takes around 500 Mbyte excluding the
various sources that are stored in it". Gentoo is very customizable
and upgradeable, but small it is not!

LWN.net has a list of Linux distros for small disk space. I hope that helps.
http://lwn.net/Distributions/#smalldisk

Julie