Small debian based server distribution

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:12:20AM +0200, Elazar Leibovich wrote:
> The default installation of Debian, without X, is about 600-800 Megabytes.
> I'm looking for a debian compatible distribution (so that I'll be able to
> use debian's security updates, and enjoy the breadth of packages etc) which
> will be small and will contain only the bare minimum for a functional server
> (say, sshd and busybox). I wish it'll be as small as possible (say, ~100Mb).

The Debian packages are sorted by "priorites":

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-priorities
By default, all the "standard" packages are installed.

If you want to override the package selection at install time, the
standard way to do that is using preseeding:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apb.html.en
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apbs04.html.en#preseed-pkgsel

That said, replacing coreusitls with busybox will not happen any time
soon in the main Debian release. There are some guys actively trying to
do similar things, and they tend to hang around http://emdebian.org .

For instance, http://www.emdebian.org/grip/

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