Reduce the size of the image

[Yes21]

Images produced by the building script have a size of 3.7 Gb, but regular 1.6RC6 only 1.7 Gb.
It takes many time to burn a 3.7 Gb on 2 µSD card (even class 10) each time one wants to try a new version !!
The rootfs partition could be reduced from 3.6 Gb to 2.4 Gb (perhaps less ?), and the user could expand it after the first boot.

[rodizio1]

Yes, could be reduced.

1.7GB like the orginal 1.6RC6 may not be possible because we now use a newer Raspbian distribution version and usually, distributions get larger with every version.

With buildroot it would be a lot smaller, I'd say well below 500MB.

[Yes21]

@careyer has just added a new wiki page .
Using this script, I could reduce the image size from 3.7 Gb to 3.1 Gb. I thought it could be smaller but ...

[careyer]

@Yes21 - did you use the -sparameter? when trying to shrink the image? Try shrinking it without(!) the -s parameter. I am at work now and can't test it here. However I shrunk the genuine 1.6RC6 yesterday to save some space on my ownCloud and the saving was immense. It was 1.7GB -> ~590MB when i remember correctly. ( all .img without furtherado ZIP or RAR compression)

Oh... and I moved the page to the Developers corner: https://github.com/bortek/EZ-WifiBroadcast/wiki/Development-~-Shrinking-Images

[rodizio1]

590MB is not possible without deleting or compressing stuff, just the files inside the image (without lost space due to file system overhead) are already 1.something gigs.

[Yes21]

@careyer I tried without parameter.

[careyer]

@rodizio1 : Yes sorry.. I was wrong. Without compression it was indeed 1.7GB.... 590MB was after compression. (just downloaded it from my cloud storage). @Yes21: thanks for trying and confirming. Saving 600MB does not make a whole lot of a difference. I'll remove the wiki site from the menu then.

[Yes21]

@careyer I thank you very much for having share this on the Wiki. 600 Mb is a few minutes less !!