I'm looking to build myself a VMWare image for PHP+MySQL Development.
At present I'm using an ubuntu image which takes ~1 GB of my hard drive space. I'm looking to replace it with something smaller and lighter.
So, I'm curious... What do you folks use? It doesn't matter what OS / webserver as long as it's running Php 5 and MySQL. The smaller and lighter the better.
Any suggestions?
Have a look at jeos - you can probably half the install size while sticking with Ubuntu. And I guess you should be able to create one with the standard server CD?
If you really want to squeeze the size, a basic Debian system should be able to fit into 250MB. You just have to take care that you unselect the "standard" set of packages while installing. Adding lighttp (approx. 1MB) and php5(-cgi ?) should only add marginally to the size of the image.
I know you said a VMWare image, but just thought I would let you know about XAMPP
They have GNU/Linux, Windows & Mac Versions. From the website (Windows Version)
The distribution for Windows 98, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Vista. This version contains: Apache, MySQL, PHP + PEAR, Perl, mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin, Webalizer, Mercury Mail Transport System for Win32 and NetWare Systems v3.32, Ming, JpGraph, FileZilla FTP Server, mcrypt, eAccelerator, SQLite, and WEB-DAV + mod_auth_mysql.
Full Windows version is ~35Mb download. Again, sorry if this does not meet your exact needs, but may contain some useful information for you.
You can try Debian Etch Mini, it is only 332 MB. Please note that you may have to apt-get dist-upgrade to lenny if you need new versions of packages.
Damn Small Linux can be configured pretty small. Other suggestions would be Debian and Gentoo.
From the asker:
Slax is the one I settled for; because it fit my needs. It's a very customizable boot-from cd linux distribution. Means that I can maintain several virtual machines which boot from the same iso image but have different states.
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A couple of the other suggestions I thought were great:
DSL : is a nice timy platform: a ready vmware image is avalable for download. Just over 50 MB. I didn't try installing xampp over it, but it should be easy enough.
jeos: looks great as well, but there's no pre-existing vmware image... which is why I didn't use it myself
The debian net-install was also a tiny and great candidate. Thoughtpolice has this and several other linux vmware images for ready download.
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Also there are three ready {x}amp images also available at the bottom of this page: http://www.fosstools.org/ ; If you're looking for an image with no additional configuration required.
You really need to look at Tiny Core Linux. I've built a Rebol webserver (cheyenne) image in about 15MB (including the OS).
Thanks! gb
There is this image http://yii.googlecode.com/files/yii-vmware-1.0.6.zip that contains php 5.2.3, postgresql, lighttpd. It is pretty small, about 17MB download, it was built using buildroot.uclibc.org