The answer to all of these questions is one simple word: Gentoo. I switched to Gentoo a couple years ago when I got fed up with the Redhat/Fedora installer. (I actually interviewed for a job there recently and told the author of the installer - Jeff Katz - I hated it to his face during the interview - needless to say I now work at Oracle.) I've found that for the machine that you want absolute minute control over each package and when you want only the minimum possible packages Gentoo is the answer. I also like it on desktop systems, but you really need something pretty fast or a lot of spare time as Xorg, KDE/Gnome and the mozilla suite take many hours to compile. But that's just my $.02... -Jared On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 19:44:59 -0500, Matt Higgins <matt.higgins@gmail.com> wrote:

I am attempting a minimal fc3 install <500 MB, I was shooting for <200MB. Looking at the @core package group from comps.xml. My calculations show this group to be about 130MB and its description tag reads "<description>Smallest possible installation</description>". However the "Minimal Install" from the installer is about 530MB. With some research it looks like, the minimal install is not just @core but also @base and @dialup. I can easily exclude @dialup by setting the uservisible tag to true and unselecting this package group. When I try the same for @base it does not show up in the package selection list?

So my questions are these

1. Is it possible though some ks syntax to exclude a default package group from my kickstart config ? i.e. -@ PackageGroup ? If this were possible I may be able to try -@base and -@dialup leaving only @core.

2. Is it possible to not use any package group at all and simply select the packages I want ? In this case I would just list out all the rpms in the @core group and thats it .. possibly some extras.

3. Is there a way to create your own core package group.. this would sever the same purpose as number 2 but possibly make it more flexible. Note I know you can create your own extra package groups my goal is to modify the existing @core group.

Some other things to note.. I have to use Fedora and I would like to have the kickstart totally unattended. I basically have the install unattended with PXE,TFTP,NFS,DHCP but .. I need to tweak the packages.

-Matt _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug

Matt,

2. Is it possible to not use any package group at all and simply select the packages I want ? In this case I would just list out all the rpms in the @core group and thats it .. possibly some extras.

Assuming you have a machine to play with this is an easy experiment to do. Do a "minimal" install and then harvest the kickstart file from /~root and save a list of the installed packages. Delete all the packages at the end of the kickstart file then list only the ones you want. Try an install with the new kickstart file. One of two things will happen depending what flags you have in the kickstart. Either the installer will autoselect any dependencies you are missing or the install will fail on missing dependencies. If your kickstart file is configured for the first option you can compare the package list on the new install to the "minimal" configuration package list. If the package lists are nearly the same then the minimal install is truly minimal and you are stuck with ~500mb. If the package list is smaller then you will be closer to a your goal. My guess is that RedHat chose the "base" and "core" nomenclature for a reason. Every other package depends on those packages. Good luck! -Adam