Paring down a FreeBSD system for flash drive use ?

[Joe Schmoe]

Hello,

I would like to fit a FreeBSD 4.10 system (not pico or anything like that) onto a 16 megabyte IDE flash drive.  I am having reasonable success doing this ... I load FreeBSD with sysinstall onto a normal hard drive, then boot it up and start deleting a lot of things and stripping out things, and when I am done I tar it all up and then put it onto the flash drive with the FIXIT floppy.

 

So far so good.  The problem is, my methods for paring down the system are extremely brutish.  Basically I use the custom menu in sysinstall and only install a bare minimum of items, but even then I have a ton of garbage on the system that I never needed, and certainly never selected in sysinstall - but they are part of the base system so I get them anyway.  Files having to do with ISDN and PPP and all sorts of libraries, etc.

So I basically just walk around the system deleting everything that looks like it is unneeded - sometimes going so far as:

 

find / -name '*ppp*' -delete

 

Is there a better strategy ?  Is there some rational way I can get an even more minimal install than the minimal install I create from the custom menu in sysinstall ?  That is, instead of deciding that I don't need PPP, and then going around deleting everything to do with PPP, is there a way to just not have PPP installed in the first place ?

 

thanks.

		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger