Small debian based server distribution

[Nadav Har'El]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010, Elazar Leibovich wrote about "Small debian based server distribution":
> 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).

I once did something like this for Redhat.

Basically, I took all the redhat RPMs and wrote a script which takes a list
of RPMs and opens them up in a directory, which I later copied to the target
machine. Choosing the right set of RPMs took some experimentation, but wasn't
too difficult. I ended up with a Linux system with sshd, busybox, httpd,
and not much more, in much less than 100 MB.

Like you said, the beautiful thing about the whole concept is that whenever
Redhat released updates, I could just run this script again and automatically
build an updated distribution - much easier than needing to create my own
distribution from scratch.

I don't know if anything of this sort exists for Debian. I would be surprised
if it didn't.


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Nadav Har'El                        |  Wednesday, Oct 27 2010, 19 Heshvan 5771
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