[Freedombox-discuss] Size of the the base image

[Lorenzo]

Hello,

To try to get a bit practical today I tried to setup a guide to assemble 
a base image from
which the freedombox firmware can be developed (by adding more packages 
and properly
configuring them).

The first thing I did was to play a bit with EmDebian to try to 
understand how small it can get.
I've built two images using multistrap with EmDebian Grip and a Baked 
EmDebian Grip (using
the demo repo published on the site) for the i386 architecture.

The size of the Grip install (with no optional packages) was of ~ 40 MB 
(using clean=true).
The size of the Baked grip install (built using packages=dash) was of ~ 
25 MB.

They seem a bit big compared to other embedded distros. As a comparison 
a buildroot
  image can fit in 4MB.

I'm not an expert in emdebian nor in embedded programming, for this 
reason I write to the list before
continuing.

My question, for the people who know EmDebian well, do you think 
EmDebian could be a good base distribution
for the freedombox? Can the images be made smaller? From what I 
understand  from the website
Crush is discontinued, and I read a mail in the emdebian mailing list 
there is no Grip for i386-ulibc.

The other question is for the people with experience in embedded 
programming. Does the size of
Grip (40MB) for the base system look excessive for a freedombox? Is it 
really necessary to build something
smaller? This size seems to be a problem if we want to target devices in 
the class of wireless
routers but should we target them in the first place? (this question is 
probably for the whole list)


Best Regards,
Lorenzo