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Hello,
I am searching for a Linux distribution aimed at installation as a guest inside VirtualBox, that would fulfil these simple requirements:
1) Have a small disk space footprint below 1 GB (the smaller the better)
2) Include a simple graphical environment like XFCE
3) Use a rather popular packaging system/repositories, like rpm/dnf, apt, pacman
Such a VBox image would be mainly distributed among a group of people to run my software. The small size requirement is due to the fact that it needs to be hosted somewhere and may be reuploaded/redownloaded quite often. 1 GB is already a lot. The popular packaging system is a requirement to reduce the maintenance hassle and allow users to install something more (like firefox) easily if they want to.
It seems that these are not standard requirements and current popular distributions do not care about them, which is understandable. Around 7 years ago I've created a similar VBox image based on Scientific Linux with XFCE and I think initially it was below 1 GB. I've searched a lot now and made some attempts, and so far I've failed.
Alpine Linux was not that small after install (I don't remember exactly, but perhaps ~800 MB), but it does not fulfil the requirement (3) (for example, I had trouble finding conda for it), and I am scared by lack of glibc. ArchBang was >2 GB. The minimal Archlinux install that I've attempted was ~1 GB, but that's still a lot. With Fedora I've managed to get I think ~1.5 GB initially. The last example - Fedora - shows that one can't rely on "system requirements" regarding the needed disk space. These are often not really minimal requirements. Thus, perhaps some members of this forum can give some advice
I am searching for a Linux distribution aimed at installation as a guest inside VirtualBox, that would fulfil these simple requirements:
1) Have a small disk space footprint below 1 GB (the smaller the better)
2) Include a simple graphical environment like XFCE
3) Use a rather popular packaging system/repositories, like rpm/dnf, apt, pacman
Such a VBox image would be mainly distributed among a group of people to run my software. The small size requirement is due to the fact that it needs to be hosted somewhere and may be reuploaded/redownloaded quite often. 1 GB is already a lot. The popular packaging system is a requirement to reduce the maintenance hassle and allow users to install something more (like firefox) easily if they want to.
It seems that these are not standard requirements and current popular distributions do not care about them, which is understandable. Around 7 years ago I've created a similar VBox image based on Scientific Linux with XFCE and I think initially it was below 1 GB. I've searched a lot now and made some attempts, and so far I've failed.
Alpine Linux was not that small after install (I don't remember exactly, but perhaps ~800 MB), but it does not fulfil the requirement (3) (for example, I had trouble finding conda for it), and I am scared by lack of glibc. ArchBang was >2 GB. The minimal Archlinux install that I've attempted was ~1 GB, but that's still a lot. With Fedora I've managed to get I think ~1.5 GB initially. The last example - Fedora - shows that one can't rely on "system requirements" regarding the needed disk space. These are often not really minimal requirements. Thus, perhaps some members of this forum can give some advice