Cutting Ubuntu to the bone for Virtualbox VM

Posted by Monty on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Monty
Published on 2010-03-31T10:01:10Z Indexed on 2010/03/31 10:03 UTC
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I've been looking around for a Linux variant which will install only the software I need rather than everything Ubuntu (for example) puts in by default. This is to create a virtual machine in Virtualbox which has bash, apache, python, perl, SQLite, openssh and a few other programs but nothing else. I'd prefer to go with Ubuntu if possible but another modern distro would do as well (I like using apt-get and yum rather than downloading/compiling etc).

So far, I've tried:

SuseStudio.com, which is probably the best so far.
Pressing F4 to get the boot options on Ubuntu 9.10, but there is no minimal installation (I think there was once).
Arch Linux, slightly confusing install procedure but I might go back and try again.
Gentoo, started well but fairly soon the HD on the virtual machine went to 2Gb, even before the installation had started in earnest (I'd partitioned the disks is all).

I realise there are various "small" Linuxes around like Puppy, Feather, DSL, etc, but they seem to be aimed at desktop users or as a techie's toolkit, and I want a small-as-possible server distro which can be managed with tools like apt or yum or similar.

TIA for any advice you can offer!

-- Monty

Cutting Ubuntu to the bone for Virtualbox VM

Posted by user32853 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by user32853
Published on 2010-03-31T10:01:10Z Indexed on 2010/03/31 11:33 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 305

Filed under:

virtualbox

|

linux

|

vm

I've been looking around for a Linux variant which will install only the software I need rather than everything Ubuntu (for example) puts in by default. This is to create a virtual machine in Virtualbox which has bash, apache, python, perl, SQLite, openssh and a few other programs but nothing else. I'd prefer to go with Ubuntu if possible but another modern distro would do as well (I like using apt-get and yum rather than downloading/compiling etc).

So far, I've tried:

SuseStudio.com, which is probably the best so far.
Pressing F4 to get the boot options on Ubuntu 9.10, but there is no minimal installation (I think there was once).
Arch Linux, slightly confusing install procedure but I might go back and try again.
Gentoo, started well but fairly soon the HD on the virtual machine went to 2Gb, even before the installation had started in earnest (I'd partitioned the disks is all).

I realise there are various "small" Linuxes around like Puppy, Feather, DSL, etc, but they seem to be aimed at desktop users or as a techie's toolkit, and I want a small-as-possible server distro which can be managed with tools like apt or yum or similar.

TIA for any advice you can offer!

-- Monty

Developer IT