[asterisk-users] asterisk on mini-itx

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Ira wrote:

> At 01:36 AM 3/11/2007, you wrote:
>> My servers don't run anything more than they need to and don't have 
>> packages loaded that they don't need. I could rant on all day about the 
>> bloat I see in modern RH/Fedora/SuSe, even my favourite Debian systems, but 
>> this isn't the place ...
>
> I'd love to have my box running that little, but how do I figure out what's 
> not needed and how to get rid of it?  One of my frustrations with the Linux 
> world is the apparent assumption of people that their target audience already 
> knows what they're talking about.

It's hard - unless you are a grumpy old man like me and have been 
"fiddling" with Unix/Linux for years and have the time & patience to prune 
stuff down.

The push right now for the major distros is to get "Linux on the Desktop" 
in a state as good as (or better!) than Windoze, so all sorts of "stuff" 
is included - printing programs, lots of eye candy, hot-plug drivers, 
sound drivers, and a whole host of other life-support code to keep the GUI 
going.

I'm willing to tolerate a lot loss that that, but newbies, or people 
who've previously been exposed to windows might not be.

You could simply start removing packages until it breaks :)
Or do a 'ps ax' and see what's actually running - work out if you need it, 
and remove it. Look in /etc/init.d and so on.

I create my flash boot systems the other awy round - I put on them just 
what I need - I am lazy though, so I have a bare-bones Debian box which is 
my development box. No X windows runs on it, I just ssh in from my main 
workstation. I then copy the whole of /bin /sbin and /lib to the flash 
device, then copy selected programs from /usr/bin. I've also worked out 
exactly which libraries I need from /usr/lib (using ldd on all the 
binaries!) remove any perl scripts in the process, make sure all 
executable files are stipped of their symbol tables and so on. This took 
time, and it's still a "work in progress"...

So I create my main flash drive, then I create a tar-file which contains 
/etc/asterisk, /var/www/bin and a few other selected files & folders. The 
system boots off flash, and early on gets this tar file off a separate 
partition on the flash device and installs it. This way I can update the 
system in 3 phases - kernel, (/boot/bzImage), main system (initrd.gz) or 
just the "software"...

Anyway, this is way off toppic :)

Gordon