Hello,

I would like to fit a FreeBSD 4.10 system (not pico or anything like that) onto
a 16 megabyte IDE flash drive. I am having reasonable success doing this ... I
load FreeBSD with sysinstall onto a normal hard drive, then boot it up and start
deleting a lot of things and stripping out things, and when I am done I tar it
all up and then put it onto the flash drive with the FIXIT floppy.

So far so good. The problem is, my methods for paring down the system are
extremely brutish. Basically I use the custom menu in sysinstall and only
install a bare minimum of items, but even then I have a ton of garbage on the
system that I never needed, and certainly never selected in sysinstall - but
they are part of the base system so I get them anyway. Files having to do with
ISDN and PPP and all sorts of libraries, etc.

So I basically just walk around the system deleting everything that looks like
it is unneeded - sometimes going so far as:

find / -name '*ppp*' -delete

Is there a better strategy ? Is there some rational way I can get an even more
minimal install than the minimal install I create from the custom menu in
sysinstall ? That is, instead of deciding that I don't need PPP, and then going
around deleting everything to do with PPP, is there a way to just not have PPP
installed in the first place ?

thanks.