Minimizing xorg-server install size

Sosowski

Sosowski

Hi!
I'm trying to revive an old Asus EEE PC using FreeBSD 12.1 install and so far everything works out of the box and I'm having a lot of fun configuring and setting stuff up!
One of the things I'm facing is fitting everything onto a 4GB storage. I've seen a topic about minimal xorg install but any attempt to install a xorg-server from packages seems to eat up at least 800MB of disk space.
Is there any way I could minimise the install size? Would rebuilding xorg-server package from ports with custom options decrease the size? (I would prolly have to do that on a remote machine tho)
Or perhaps 4GB is not really enough for a graphical desktop system and I should increase the storage? (I could probably throw in an SD card and mount it to /usr )
On the good side, with xorg and awesome installed everything works fine, but there's no space left for browser (as firefox with deps takes up another 1GB).
I'm always wanted to try out FreeBSD and am super excited when I found this tiny laptops works perfectly with it! Any help will be super-appreciated!
Cheers!
Sos
 
First install normal/full x11/xorg. If installation was successful and you have a working xorg, then start to delete unnecessary ports. Nothing wrong with minimal xorg, but a lot of people end up with a non-functional xorg. I've installed x11/xorg, x11-wm/i3 and x11/dmenu on my PC and it start/idle at 683MB memory usage. Of course it is minimum and beside regular xorg/i3 no application is running.
 
vigole said:
First install normal/full x11/xorg. If installation was successful and you have a working xorg, then start to delete unnecessary ports. Nothing wrong with minimal xorg, but a lot of people end up with a non-functional xorg. I've installed x11/xorg, x11-wm/i3 and x11/dmenu on my PC and it start/idle at 683MB memory usage. Of course it is minimum and beside regular xorg/i3 no application is running.
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Thanks, I'll try that! It seems that devel/llvm is the main culprit. I wonder if I can run Xorg without it. RAM is not as much of an issue as disk space. 4GB is really limiting, and it seems that SD card functionality is broken for EEE PC 701 as I wasn't able to install to SD entirely or even use it as /usr (the installer crashes)

sysctl said:
Perhaps you should give NomadBSD a try.
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Thanks for the suggestion, but I'd like to put this together myself and write a guide for peopel with old EEEs stuck in their drawers.

sysctl said:
I would recommend www/otter-browser instead of www/dillo2.
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It seems that www/otter-browser is a bit too demanding. I did try to run it using framebuffer with QT_QPA_PLATFORM=bsdfb otter-browser too but couldn't get input to work. www/dillo2 seems to be working fine, tho.

So far, I am wondering if port dependencies that are only needed for building get unnecessary pulled with the package manager (like Qt pulls Qmake, even tho it's not needed outside of build).
I'll set up a working Xorg and keep removing packages until it breaks and take notes.
 
Sosowski said:
4GB is really limiting, and it seems that SD card functionality is broken for EEE PC 701 as I wasn't able to install to SD entirely or even use it as /usr (the installer crashes)
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It's been a while, but I used to run FreeBSD off a 16G SD card on my EEE PC 701. I seem to recall there was a setting in the BIOS to reduce the SD card speed which was necessary for installation. Be aware that the ethernet driver is being dropped in FreeBSD 13 if memory serves me. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/Laptops/Asus_Eee
 
Elazar said:
Use Wayland/hikari?
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That pulls in more dependencies than xorg-minimal. Including LLVM.

Sosowski said:
seems to be a lot less packages in number, but not so in size
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Are you able to build from ports (rather than using packages)? Perhaps try to disable as many optional extras as possible in the port options.

Otherwise I would recommend installing xorg manually without the meta-package. in particular I would miss off the mesa-dri package which I *think* is what pulls in llvm (due to LLVMpipe). You might lose 3D acceleration but we can address that later.
 
mesa uses llvm, yes. Without it, there is no guarantee that mesa will continue to work, and without mesa you won't get any graphics acceleration. I believe that most things desktop uses that these days. There is no option to turn off the llvm dependency in mesa.
 
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