MichaelCole.com

Image via Wikipedia

I recently upgraded from ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. 

At the same time, I upgraded from an older computer to a newer pc I built from parts off newegg.

The Best Thing About Ubuntu?

Image via Wikipedia

Virtualization is great!  I can run a full native linux stack on my windows PC.

I want to share this image with others using bittorrent.  To speed up downloads, I want to make the exported files as small as possible. I don't necessarily need to shrink the images files on my host computer, just the exported files.

So the plan is to export it as an ovf (open virtualization format) and vmdk format, and then create a bittorrent.

I accomplished this in three steps:

Creating an Ubuntu 9.04 virtual machine in Virtualbox is easy.  Creating one small enough to share through bittorrent is a bit more of a challenge. 

I created a script below to slim down a fresh Ubuntu 9.04 install from 2.2gb down to 1.1gb. 

I didn't find an easy way to do it besides spending alot of time in the package managers.  Here's a couple of interesting things I found:

To create a list of installed packages sorted by size try this: