Fedora for tiny devices - exessive dependencies

[Christopher Blizzard]

For OLPC our disk image is pretty small, and we're carrying a lot of
desktop packages.  So we know it's possible to make a device that's in
the 250MB disk size range, it's just a question of what you want to
include and what functionality you want.  The way that our "base" distro
is set up makes that hard, though.

But we're seeing more and more small devices and lots of them use
Fedora.  It's just a question of what tools to use to build images.
We're using pilgrim:

http://git.fedoraproject.org/?p=pilgrim/.git;a=summary

which lets us pick a really small subset.  It also uses a better
initramfs solution that will work on cdroms, usb drives, etc, so you can
slap an image onto a cheap usb hdd or flash drive and it can be used
there.  David Zeuthen did a lot of this work and his posts to the
mailing list archives give a good overview, as does the readme:

http://git.fedoraproject.org/?p=pilgrim/.git;a=blob;f=README.fedora;h=aa64cfda24576f3cb81b2ab99b2aae0fb0a2b8ae;hb=HEAD

--Chris