The default installations of Fedora 12 (64-bit intel and 32-bit ppc, at least) are really bloated. There are tons of new packages that don’t belong in a default installation. There are a ton more than I just don’t have any need for. To be fair, you can do a net install which gives you a smaller footprint to begin with and you have the option to customize the installations to avoid installing anything you don’t need in the first place. But do I really need special support packages for specific Lexmark printers by default? How about cheese, ivtv-firmware, or fpaste?

Can anyone think of any other audio related packages I can get rid of? I don’t need audio, cd burning, flashy 3d graphics, printing, image or video playback/record capabilities on this machine at all.

Lets get a running start… Make sure KeepAlive is set to ‘On’, HostnameLookups is ‘Off’ and comment out most of the modules loaded in your default Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, other bloated distribution’s choice for default modules. Most of them you won’t need or want to have available. You’ll probably need rewrite and php, …