[BL] which BL? advice needed

baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org baslinux at lists.ibiblio.org
Wed Dec 12 11:35:40 EST 2007


> ===================
> James wrote:
>>
>> For what it's worth, Opera 9.50 does work on BL 3.5
How much larger is it and does it add anything useful?

>
> I don't know about Opera 9.50, but 9.21 does work.
>> From message dated Wed Jun 6 2007
>
>> I've just installed Opera 9.21 on BL3.  It works!
>> However it doesn't go in as cleanly as Opera 8
>> -- you get some nonfatal error messages.

I got something about /bin/pwd and plugins from 9.23 while loading.

>> Opera 9 is significantly bigger than Opera 8.
>> I installed Opera 8 without problem in a 40mb
>> test partition, but when I did the same thing
>> with Opera 9, it overflowed the partition and
>> spit out pages of error messages.  However,
>> once you've installed Opera 9.21 and deleted
>> all the installation files, it occupies just
>> 28mb -- that includes the BL3 foundation and
>> the required add-ons (glibc2, misc-libs, x-libs).

It can be made smaller with upx - 14.4MB unpacked, and 5.7MB packed. And 
by adding ONLY the libraries actually used by opera rather than all of the 
above.  For instance, of the X libraries it needs to have added libXext, 
libSM, libICE (168K - and these three are also used by icewm), of libc it 
needs libpthread, libdl, libm, libc (all listed by ldd) and two others 
(libresolv and libnss_dns) for resolving dns numbers), all in /lib, and it 
needs from misc-libs only /usr/lib/libz (76K) - another 2,274K.  About 
2.5MB total with the xlibs.

You can set parameters to keep a much smaller cache than 20MB, and delete 
it on exit.

You can rename windows_skin.zip to standard_skin.zip, which is smaller and 
easier to read.  You can delete install.sh (50) if you don't want to 
install it.  If you are not going to use any plugins you could probably 
delete that 260K directory but I have not tried it.  The opera wrapper 
script is 9K and is not used after installation.  320K less.

With upx-ed opera, after running it for a while (there are some user 
settings) and not deleting plugs in install.sh, I have 8.5MB of Opera plus 
the 2.5MB of libraries, or 11MB not 28MB.  I could delete another 310K.
Without UPX-ing it would be another 9MB.


I have BL3.50 (for root only so far) running in 76MB with the basics and 
also Opera 9.23, lynx-uclibc, kermit for libc5, links2 for BL3 X, gs-noX 
and abiword (sharing fonts), svgalib, svp, zgv, the FULL netpbm for glibc 
(with documentation), antiword, sox, mplayer, arena browser, base64, ftp, 
nano, msmtp, required libraries (libpng, libjpeg, svgalib libraries). With 
documentation for antiword, mplayer, zgv, msmtp.  I may add pilot-link.

This could all go into a 100MB loop file.

Someone wants an email computer.  I offered BL3.50, but I would need to 
help set it up with their login, password and phone number, since it won't
work with CD that the ISP sends out and the typical user cannot handle 
pppsetup.  (One person thought his computer was broken when linux console 
came on the screen and wanted a password).  I would add Opera and 
Abiword to the menu.  Perhaps all the BL3 packages could be on the menu by 
default but remarked out with #.

I will try to write a script for making BL3.50 usable by 'user'.  Do I use 
cat to add lines to rc (making ttyp? and ptyp? o+rw) and if so how?

Sindi

> Cheers,
> Steven



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