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I’ve been just installing a Linux in a VM again (using VirtualBox, tested with 1.5.6). As a minimal system, I choose Debian (with minimal I mean that you don’t get much unused stuff, it boots fast and the disk usage is reasonable. I know that DSL or whatever would be smaller, this is just about getting a decent work system up and running quickly). Here’s a small howto:
- Get the Debian Net-Installer from Debian.org (180 MiB)
- Install debian, when it comes to package setup deselect “Desktop system“
- After reboot, install (using
apt-get install):- x-window-system-core
- kde-core
- kdm
- g++
- Reboot
- Install the VM additions, but install the kernel headers first using:
apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` - Reboot, notice that the network doesn’t seem to work any longer
- Run dhcpd (as root)
Done. This gives you a quite small debian installation which works fine and uses really little disk space (1.10 GiB including the swap-file).
[Update] dhcpd has to be run as root in case no network connection is found.
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