CoreDump

More and more people switch to Gmail every day. According to the latest stats Gmail has grown to be the fourth most used webmail application in only four years. Gmail offers a great service and a simple and powerful user interface. Still, some people (like me) prefer to keep a copy of their email locally or even use their favorite desktop application to check email instead of a web browser. My favorite Unix tool for downloading email is fetchmail.

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Recently I had to create a vmware image with Debian GNU/Linux that had to be as small as possible because people would have to download it. I started installing Debian “sid” by using debootstrap according to the following instructions: Installing Debian GNU/Linux from a Unix/Linux System. When I completed the installation and after I removed all the unnecessery packages I had a fully functional system that occupied 400MB of disk space. The problem was that the VMWare image size was 1.2GB although only 1/3 of it was actually being used.

I suppose this happens because VMWare preallocates space to improve the performance of IO operations. If I try to compress the image as it is the compression ratio will be really low. The reason is that the preallocated free space contains random data that is hard to compress. If we could fill this free space with a repeating pattern then we could achieve a much higher compression ratio.

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Update: Debian Lenny 5.0 now has support for the option autoremove of apt-get that is able to clean all unused dependencies.

Curiosity and laziness are the two most important reasons that my system ends up with lots of useless software after a couple months of usage. Many times I want to test drive a program and if it suits my needs I’ll keep it otherwise it will end up in /dev/null.

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Note: This post was written back when I used to have a Debian GNU/Linux machine as my desktop computer. The Debian version at that time was etch 4.0. Nowadays I have a new shiny MacBook Pro with Mac OS X Leopard that I use as my main work machine so some of the information in this page might be out-of-date or inaccurate.

Whenever I format my computer (and trust me that happens really often) I want only the programs I use to be installed and nothing else. I don’t like having my machine overloaded with crappy software that I never use (that’s the case with Microsoft Windows). So every time I have to remember which programs I want and install them one by one with apt-get. For that reason I decided to create a list with all the programs I need. In that way I can just copy – paste the list every time I format.

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