Reducing the size of the Debian Installation Footprint

It may be useful to reduce the size of the installation footprint on Embedded systems, or on older computers or laptops with limited drive space, or in cases where a small installation is preferred.

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Removing non-critical packages

Remove unnecessary locale files

The introduction of LanguagePacks (tdebs) may also help in reducing the size of the installation footprint.

Remove foreign language man files

rm -rf /usr/share/man/??
rm -rf /usr/share/man/??_*

rm /usr/share/doc/*/copyright*

Rebuilding packages using the Tiny C Compiler

Remove unnecessary cups dependencies

SmallKernel Build a smaller kernel using fewer options

Reduce the size of the X installation footprint

Replace the getty processes with the ngetty single process daemon

The getty processes can be replaced by the ngetty single process daemon to reduce virtual memory utilization:

See Also