Gentoo 20090217 Plug Computer Distribution
From PlugWiki
If you would like to have a normal Gentoo installation, using an SD card or USB device as root filesystem, please read the official guide, otherwise, if you want to put a minimal Gentoo system on the SheevaPlug NAND, keep reading.
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Gentoo Plug Computer Distribution
With Gentoo Linux, if using the emerge --sync method to keep your Portage ebuilds up to date, you will soon realize that the date of stability chosen is important. In this case, we froze the Portage synchronization on February 17, 2009 for reference. We are keeping two sets of packages for the Plug Computer running Gentoo to coincide with stability or leading-edge ebuilds.
The Gentoo Baseline Distribution for the Plug
Based on TFTP and NFS (or enough persistent storage), Gentoo works the Plug Computer as if it were a full-blown desktop system without X-windows. This large, 100 MB bzipped file, Baseline Gentoo, distribution has the fundamental software development components and some core networking features we expect from untrimmed distributions based on the Linux kernel. This image is too large to present on the Wiki since there is no way you could flash the resulting image onto the Plug Computer that exists now. The bzipped, tar ball to mount via NFS root is available from the URL on the Baseline Gentoo page.
Plug Computer Gentoo Distributions: the Core and SELinux-Based
From the larger Baseline Gentoo Linux distribution, there is a smaller distribution that is suitable for flashing onto a Plug Computer with the barebones components for using the Plug Computer but not developing on it. For that, you want to make the Baseline Gentoo or add the binary packages you want to the SELinux Plug Computer Gentoo Distribution, which is discussed on Using Gentoo on the Plug Computer.
Creating the Core Gentoo Plug Computer Distribution
The creation of a smaller SELinux distribution:
* SELinux Plug Computer Gentoo Distribution
was initially done by manually removing documents and software capabilities from the Baseline without creating a new overlay. The methodology is provided below.
What was Removed from the Baseline Gentoo Plug Computer Distribution
The Baseline Gentoo Distribution is 1.9 GB. Here is how the baseline distribution was trimmed
* removed all /usr/share/doc and /usr/share/man documentation: 1.6 GB (new size)
* removed non-essential packages: ~890 MB left
* apache (left off of Baseline as well)
* samba (left off of Baseline as well)
* libtool, binutils, make, m4, patch, man, man-pages, groff, less
* perl, ddclient, libperl
* dbus (and associates including selinux-dbus) and friends
* e2fsprogs, e2fsprogs-libs, device-mapper, lvm2, and cryptsetup
* netplug, arping, serf, libpcap, libupnp
* acl, libgcrypt, libcap
* subversion, git, libgamin, apr, apr-util
* php, glib, slang
* vim (and all editors but nano)
* linux-headers, kernel sources, and vanilla-sources
* all static libraries (*.a including libc_nonshared.a)
* emerge files removed: ~270 MB left
* /usr/portage/metadata/cache/*
* /usr/portage (ALL but profiles directory)
* all header files: 220 MB left
* lots of utilities not used on a regular basis
