Paring down a FreeBSD system for flash drive use ?

[Francois Tigeot]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 09:04:28PM -0700, Joe Schmoe wrote:
> 
> Murray Taylor <murraytaylor at bytecraftsystems.com> wrote: 
> Google for minibsd
> 
> http://neon1.net/misc/minibsd.html
> 
> Thanks - this is interesting.  However, this is still somewhat of a brute force method for piecing things together - I thought there was some kind of elegant mechanism where you could edit make.conf or something, so that when you did a make world, it would skip the components that you didn't want to - and you could control it with much more granularity than you can in the custom menu in sysinstall ... does this sound familiar at all ?
> 
> That is, forget that I am doing solid state / flash at all - what is the correct way to install FreeBSD without things like ppp, isdn, and other pieces of the _base_ system that you don't want ?

You have to edit /etc/make.conf and add NO_xxx lines in it (look in
/usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf).

In addition, I use custom CFLAGS when possible. Sometimes -Os produces
broken code (X11 comes to mind).

My /etc/make.conf looks like this:

	CFLAGS=-Os -march=c3 -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe
	NO_ACPI=yes
	NO_CVS=true
	[more NO_xxx lines]

I then install the new world in a separate directory:

	make world DESTDIR=/itx

But even though this procedure gives a minimal system, it is too big
for my requirements (FreeBSD + X11 + rdesktop in 16MB). I am still forced
to pick and choose components by hand.

-- 
Francois Tigeot