Compressing a VMWare image file
Posted on July 10th, 2009 by Haris Andrianakis in Linux Notes, tags: compress, linux, vmware
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.
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.
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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