Linode.com Forum

[isho]

Help! I'm new to Gentoo and portage so I probably made mistakes...

I'm building a machine to use as a general purpose dev webserver. I started by installing mysql, apache, php, perl, pure-ftpd, emacs, and gentoolkit

... and now I'm out of disk space, more than 1.7G which doesn't seem right too me?

Am I doing something wrong? I have a feeling that perl and php compiled a bunch of packages that I don't need.

Here's the USE variable I set in /etc/make.conf

USE="emacs java perl curl imagemagick jikes mysql -kde -qt -gnome -gdk -X -truetype -opengl -xmms -oggvorbis -opengl
-avi -quicktime -xmms -mpeg"


What USE variables do other people with similar needs use?

What's the best way too figure out which packages are taking up the most space and their dependancies?

Does anyone else have any tips on how to keep Gentoo small?

Thanks in Adavance

[adamgent]

Hi,

To save diskspace you can delete the files from

/var/log/portage/* /usr/portage/distfiles/*

I purge those dirs daily as they do seem to take up alot of space.

The logs arnt that important if all goes well and the distfiles once the package has finished emerging you do not need the distfiles anymore.

Adam

[isho]

Thanks, that saved me 300M.

Do you know the best way to identify packages that aren't needed anymore after adjusting the USE variable?

Ishmael

[adamgent]

Hi,

Most of the packages are proabably still needed even after the USE flag ajustment, but some packages may need to be recompiled due to the changes.

I have a program to see if anything needs to be re-compiled will post it later.

Adam

[Cool_blade]

I don't understand why people use Gentoo on a distributed system like linode for a web/email server.

It just doesn't seem to fit the bill, unless you precompile your emerge stuff on another host and then upload it - but that seems like an awful amount of work.

There's probably a way to trim down your portage tree down to the bare essentials.

And you'd want to tune down your USE flags heaps, like -kde -X11, pretty much everything client side.

[bigbiff]

I believe emerge -k will search for a binary package first, and compile from source if it is not available. Try emerge -K to do binaries only. Gentoo can do binaries too. :)

[Bill Clinton]

Cool_blade wrote: I don't understand why people use Gentoo on a distributed system like linode for a web/email server.

It just doesn't seem to fit the bill, unless you precompile your emerge stuff on another host and then upload it - but that seems like an awful amount of work.


Not to start a flame war, but rather some real discussion ...

I have to agree, it doesn't make much sense either. From what I'm seeing, the amount of time required to compile and upkeep the source-installation-tree is far more than the amount of time given back in CPU optimizations.

Additionally, most distros ship with optimized versions of the few libraries that will make a difference ( /lib/i686 exists for a reason! ) And for things like email, database, httpd, I'd be some what surprised if most didn't manually compile those by hand to begin with.

Bill Clinton