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xz compression in Squeeze (smaller ISO size)

Fri Oct 26, 2012 4:32 pm

xz compession, supported in wheezy/sid, was discussed a while back. Some users may not know that newer squashfs-tools is available in squeeze-backports. With that and => 2.6.38 kernel "xz" compression works fine for a Squeeze snapshot.

Benchmark test here, squashfs from the same base filesystem:
640.8 MB (default gzip)
560.7 MB (xz)

Leaves quite a bit of room for more apps than was possible before

Make sure this line exists in sources.list :

Code:
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main


Code:
apt-get update

# check first that -686-pae will run on target machines, -486 and others are available
# substitute apt-get for corresponding aptitude command if preferred

apt-get install -t squeeze-backports linux-image-686-pae
apt-get install -t squeeze-backports linux-headers-686-pae
apt-get install -t squeeze-backports squashfs-tools

If it runs good, purge the standard squeeze kernel and save more space for snapshot

More recent snapshot versions https://github.com/fsmithred/refracta support xz
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