On 10/01/17 12:53, Bill Maidment wrote:
> Well I tried an 8GB USB stick and ran out of room.
> So I've answered by own question!
> I wonder how long before a 16GB stick will be too small !!!

Consider the average market price for 16GB USB drives ... and the 8GB
flash drives are "thrown after you" as marketing gadgets on conferences
... is this really so shocking?

> There used to be a day when a single floppy was enough for an OS install. Oh! how we have progressed(?) 

Right ... where you had just a full screen command line, single tasking
OS with odd memory management and no TCP/IP stack, no internet software
at all, not office package, no real graphical desktop environment, no
package management ... and the list is soooo much longer.  But why
bother comparing apples with apples ;-)

If you want a core Linux OS with the same feature set as the single
floppy OS installs, I'm sure you can scrap it down to a few hundred MB,
if not less ... but will you be happy with such a micromalistic install?
 By the way, the Atomic images - which is basically a pre-installed
minimalistic base image is roughly 1.2GB.  But it provides more features
than just the good old DOS installs.

And as a reference point, the FreeDOS 1.2 (recently released!) full
installer is about 415MB or so - the minimal install is just below 30MB!
 But even the full installer here includes the TCP/IP stack, iirc.

But of course, if you want to rant about the size of how things have
evolved in the RHEL/CentOS/SL world - the Fedora mailing lists is
probably a more reasonable starting point, which bases the foundation of
packages in RHEL ... and by the way, how does macOS and Windows installs
fare today?

(Sorry for biting ..... I just couldn't resist)


-- 
kind regards,

David Sommerseth