A great way to make any of the ISOs smaller would be to
compress most of the executables (and maybe libraries..
not exactly sure of the capability) with UPX.
The stable UPX version has been around a while and
generally compresses the executables better than ZIP can
[not sure about GZIP].
A quick description on how UPX works is in order (since its
mode operation may be unknown to those important
people).
Compression phase:
- one-time only needed
- customizable compression level
-- higher compression level needs more time and memory
to compress
- shows before & after sizes as well as executable type
Execution phase:
- micro-bootstrap in executable decompresses the
program executable image and starts the image
- speed of decompression independant of compression
level [though for disk access, higher compression level
could result in miniscule improvements in speed]
- speed of execution is the exact same as non-compressed
executable since running the program results in an
identical program in memory
Oh yeah... compressing kernel stuff might not be
recommended since it might make tricky memory
accesses and such that could potentially be bad with a
boot-strap loading it... but... it's somethin to try out and
test.
feel free to email me any questions about this.