Minimal Installation of Fedora 30

This is how to do a minimal installation of Fedora 30. Obviously Fedora is not the best distro to do a minimal install. However, it can be done.

  1. Grab the netinstall iso from https://alt.fedoraproject.org/
  2. Boot the CD, choose “Install Fedora 30”
  3. Choose your language, click continue
  4. Choose “Installation Destination”, choose “Storage Configuration” –> “Custom”, click “Done”

5. In “Manual Partitioning” choose “Standard Partition”, add one root partition (“/”)

6. Create a swap partition (optional) 7. click “Done” and “Accept changes” 8. Back in the Installation summary choose “Software selection” 9. choose “Fedora Custom Operating System” (Note: this is even smaller then the “Minimal Installation” option)

10. Click “Done”, then “Begin Installation” 11. Create a root password and a user

After the installation boot your system and login as root, then we will configure it to be even more minimal

Remove unnecessary components

dnf remove firewalld
dnf remove sssd-*
dnf remove audit
dnf remove NetworkManager
dnf remove chrony

Since we removed NetworkManager we must install other means to configure network

dnf install network-scripts

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-[name-of-your-network-interface] and set a fixed ip address

TYPE=Ethernet
PROXY_METHOD=none
BROWSER_ONLY=no
BOOTPROTO=none
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=no
NAME=[name-of-your-network-interface]
UUID=[your-uuid]
DEVICE=[name-of-your-network-interface]

ONBOOT=yes
AUTOCONNECT_PRIORITY=-999

IPADDR=[YOUR IP]
NETMASK=[YOUR NETMASK]
GATEWAY=[YOUR GATEWAY]
DNS1=1.1.1.1

Enable the network service

chmod a+x /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-[name-of-your-network-interface]
systemctl enable network

Reboot

That's it. Your Fedora system runs now with the smallest but still reasonable config possible. On my system it uses 1.2 GB hard disk space and uses 114 MB RAM. Of course, if you now start to install software it is very likely that some of the packages we removed will be pulled in back.

Minimal installation of Xorg with Fluxbox

If you want to use this system with a GUI, this are the commands to install a minimal Xorg installation with the fluxbox window manager:

dnf install fluxbox
dnf install xterm
dnf install xorg-x11-server-Xorg
dnf install xorg-x11-xinit
dnf install xorg-x11-drv-*
dnf install mesa-dri-drivers

Now login as a user and edit ~/.xinitrc exec startfluxbox

Save the file and then type startx. The fluxbox window manager will appear, you should be able to right-click and launch xterm