Although many virtual machine appliances exist today and are conveniently to download, such as the VMWare Virtual Appliance Marketplace and the TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library, it may be necessary to create a virtual machine image of your own and distribute it among the others. The issue is that a virtual machine image can easily become a monster and can be difficult to host, upload, download, and distribute such a large image. Previously, I attempted to create Linux virtual machine images with small footprint using the approach of installing the system and removing unnecessary packages. That approach leads to virtual machine images compressible to around 1GB archives.
Lately, I have opted to a second approach in which we install a bare bone Linux system and then install necessary packages. This approach, I found, often leads to smaller footprint than the previous approach.
The only caveat is that this approach may not work well with certain Linux distributions if the Linux distribution does not provide a means to install bare bone systems. If a Linux distribution does not provide a means to install the bare bone systems, it is likely to be a desktop edition, for instance, Ubuntu Linux's Desktop Edition has no option for a user to install a bare bone system during its installation process. A workaround is to create the system image using its corresponding server edition distribution, for instance, Ubuntu Linux's Server Edition allows you to install a bare bone system.
At present, I have a 64-bit Ubuntu Linux Server Edition image with PostGreSQL, Apache Web Server, and PHP but without GUI and the image is compressed to about 350MB archive.
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