Ubuntu – Minimal server installation

serverubuntu-minimal

I am currently running Ubuntu Server 10.10 through a virtual machine to use as a stack for web development and a chance to get to grips with the Ubuntu command line, however I'd really like to set up a clean, minimal install with only the bare minimum of core utilities so I can get only what I need as I go along.

The Ubuntu Server iso seems to install a lot of extras already and I'd prefer just the bare minimum so I can spend more time aquainting myself with the installation and set up of the packages I need. Can I obtain an image that does this?

Best Answer

This is what the ubuntu-minimal images are for. ~15MB of lean, mean Ubuntu. But if you're anything like me, you'll likely just end up installing it all back. Quite a few things require ubuntu-standard which layers on most of what the server disk installs.

You can read more about ubuntu-minimal and download it from the official help page.

Edit: Okay I've just done a minimal install. It does download extra packages as part of the installation and it's more that it really needs to run a base system.

The output of du -sh / is 632MB. It's a bit heftier than the previously advertised 15MB but it does install ubuntu-standard which I'm sure there is some way of avoiding. I've experienced it first hand because one of my server companies offers bare-minimal Ubuntu installs without ubuntu-standard.

I'll keep looking.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to install one GUI program on Ubuntu Server

You can install X without a complete desktop environment but to be upfront and honest, installing ubuntu-desktop is probably the quickest and config-free method of doing what you want.

For our media centre, I use a simple stack of: nodm → xserver-xorg → openbox. It's very raw but it allows me (with a bit of scripting) to have the system boot to X and then launch the media centre application (Boxee here). I could probably have gone without openbox but it's nice to have some sort of Window Manager just in case I do want to run something else.

When I was doing it, I followed a whole raft of different documentation but the bulk of it is summed up here. In short you should be aiming to:

Install nodm, X, etc.
Configure nodm by telling it what user to run as (I do suggest creating a non-root user)
Create a ~/.xsession file to boot whatever application you want to be running. In my case this is:
```
#!/bin/sh

exec /home/oli/uberboxee
```
You'd just swap out /home/oli/uberboxee for your launcher.

Just as a side note, if you install something that requires, for example, GTK, you'll find it might pull in a massive number of recommended packages. To keep things light, I strongly consider you run your apt-get installs with the --no-install-recommends flag.

The Low Memory System page on help.ubuntu.com is a good resource for finding alternatives to the Gnome desktop. Installing a desktop suite is going to bring a lot of stuff but it might save you a little bit of configuration.

Ubuntu – Are Ubuntu Server and Desktop configured/compiled differently

They all have the same repositories. The only difference is what packages get installed by default. Once you have an Ubuntu server up and running you can say tasksel install ubuntu-desktop and you get a fully-functional Ubuntu desktop. You could in principle start with Ubuntu desktop and then remove packages, but that would be a lot of useless work.

Some applications, such as Emacs and Vi, come in multiple variants, with or without GUI support. For Emacs, on a server with no graphics you would install the package emacs-nox.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to install one GUI program on Ubuntu Server

Ubuntu – Are Ubuntu Server and Desktop configured/compiled differently

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