Development environment suggestion ?

[Joel Newkirk]

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:19:04 +0200, "Olivier Migeot" <larrycow at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Joel Newkirk <freerunner at newkirk.us>
> wrote:
> 
>> It currently uses 2.3gb of that partition, while a 7zip archive of the
> entire VM weighs in at about 1.4gb.
> 
> Did you try to "zero-fill" the image before compressing it? Not that
> your ratio is anything bad, but it might get better (a lot of the
> "used space" on a Linux partition is already filled of
> easily-shrinkable text files, for example).
> 
> A simple "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/fillme ; rm /tmp/fillme" usually
> does the trick, and I managed to compress some of my images (well,
> those were more LAMP appliances than dev workstation, I have to say)
> to higher ratios, IIRC.
> 
> Good work anyway.
> 
> --
> Olivier
>  M.

Is that procedure applicable when VMware is set up to autosize the
partition?  I've got it set to 8gb partition size as a max. (stupid really
that it won't let you select a max size larger than is presently available,
when it's told not to actually allocate the space until used)

Also, since posting that message I realized I'd forgotten to flush out apt
archive again, which cleared up a good-size chunk of space.  (IIRC, about
400mb)

j