Possible to get ubuntu 7.10 installed with 4gb of space?

[aceO07]

I'm interested in getting ubuntu 7.10 installed on my 4gb usb flash drive with VMWare.

I need to have ubuntu installed on that amount of space, with enough room for development software and database. Maybe 1gb of free space?

Is it possible and how would I go about it?

 

[xSauronx]

do you want to just keep the vm guest on a flash drive and use vmware to open it? or you want to install ubuntu on a flash drive and use that as a Host OS for vmware?

im pretty sure its not going to be possible with 4gb. my install seems to take about 4 as it is, though admittedly ive added *some* software, and removed a few bits. Xubuntu might be a better fit, it comes with much less installed iirc, and is lighter overall.

 

[Nothinman]

Just do a minimal install, which will probably be easier with the server disc, and then add the stuff that you want from there.

 

[Brazen]

A fairly clean server of mine with nothing extra but Apache2 and PHP installed is using 1656MB of hard drive space + 512MB for swap. This is on a 3.6GB vm hard drive image. I make all my server images that size and then add a second hard drive image for the data.

If you want to work with command line only, then it would definitely be doable. You should probably just try an install on your harddrive and see how much space it takes up. As xSauronx said, Xubuntu will be slimmer then the other gui variants, or as Nothinman said you could do a server install and then add on an even lighter Window Manager like Fluxbox or Icewm (not sure if those are in the repos or not).

 

[aceO07]

Just to follow up. I managed to do it. I created a 3.8GB drive for my ubuntu vm, which is hosted on Windows. Then I compress it on and put it on my 4GB usb drive. It came out to be 800MB this morning at max compression with 7zip. It took a long time though, about 20-25minutes to compress!. At fast compression (later in the date and a few more apps installed), it came to be 1GB and took 15minutes on a slower machine. So, I didn't end up just having the plain files on my usb drive. I compressed them and just uncompress when I'm at work or home. Of course this takes a while to set up, but it's probably faster accessing the vm files from a harddrive than from the usb anyways. Last I checked, I still had about 500MB free on the vm drive after jdk, ruby, eclipse, mysql, amarok.. etc..

 

[DaiShan]

I'm running it on a 2gb stick with a 1.1GB partition for storage. Check pendrivelinux.com for an easy how-to.

 

[aceO07]

Originally posted by: DaiShan
I'm running it on a 2gb stick with a 1.1GB partition for storage. Check pendrivelinux.com for an easy how-to.

Thanks for the tip. I'll look into it. Bootable ubuntu usb drive probably won't be viable for work (LAN issues and also need Windows dev apps as well), but it's be nice for home computer to trial without VMware.

 

[wiin]

Originally posted by: xSauronx
do you want to just keep the vm guest on a flash drive and use vmware to open it? or you want to install ubuntu on a flash drive and use that as a Host OS for vmware?

im pretty sure its not going to be possible with 4gb. my install seems to take about 4 as it is, though admittedly ive added *some* software, and removed a few bits. Xubuntu might be a better fit, it comes with much less installed iirc, and is lighter overall.

I wanted to dual boot Xp and xubuntu (still do) but was not successful. I have a 20gig h/d with 5gig partition running xp. xubuntu did not install but it did managed to kill my xp partition. So I had to refomat the drive and reinstall xp(on 5gig partition again). So, how do I get xubuntu to install without killing the xp partition? With 5gig for xp, I have 15gig free space for xubuntu installation.

 

[Fox5]

Ubuntu can fit in 4GB.
Perhaps try the alternate text based installer for ubuntu (seperate download), I think it installs less by default if the normal one won't fit.
Also, I believe ReiserFS is the most efficient (in terms of storage space) of the file system options available, so you may want to format the flash drive as such on your own.