F14-build size

[Daniel Drake]

On 25 May 2011 08:50, Yioryos Asprobounitis <mavrothal at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There is some discussion about the usability of F14 builds in relation to their size [1]
> F14 builds are _really big_ for the 1GB XO-1 NAND leaving very little space for the user. If a few videos or wiki is installed or even try olpc-update you may run out of space.

I filed http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/10911 so that we investigate the
size growth. Also CCing Yader who expressed some interest in helping
us figure this out.

I personally feel that having GNOME (even in 10.1) on XO-1 is too
heavy size-wise for the laptops, and I know of various deployments
that don't ship it for reasons like these. So, while serious, these
issues won't affect the whole user base at this level.

> I was wondering if unused locales could be removed (a la localepurge) at first boot or after language selection, modifying also accordingly `%_install_langs'.
> This should save considerable space and make F14 builds more usable for the 1 million XO-1s out there.
> Of course deployments could make heir own builds and modify them accordingly, but I'm sure that many places may not have this luxury.

We already ship a fixed set of locales, as specified by the build
config, with all others removed. These are
en_US,en_AU,es,ar,pt,pt_BR,fr,ht,mn,mr_IN,am_ET,km_KH,ne_NP,ur_PK,rw,ps,fa_AF,si,zh_CN,de

Also, again note that deployments can (and do) strip this down for
their own builds.


As for olpc-update issues, I suspect that updating from old major
releases to 11.2.0 will be difficult (for disk space reasons) just as
it was for 10.1. I think we just have to live with this (its the
expense of shipping such a large software base on a small disk). But
perhaps you were referring to the inability to olpc-update between
individual 11.2.0 builds; that is now fixed, starting from build 20.
(so the build 20-to-21 update should work fine)

You say that stripping firmware, dri and locale saves 50% of the disk
space. Have you measured this or is this guesswork? It seems unlikely
to me that these items would constitute ~350mb of compressed space,
but I won't argue against real numbers ;)

Daniel