[Udpcast] How to udpcast on G5 Mac?

[Donald Teed]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Rishi R. Arora wrote:

> I am going to look at "g4u" as well and may be that's even a faster
> efficient solution for my needs.  My image is already compressed at 21GB,
> which extracts to about 29GB on disk.  This image has about 15 pieces of
> software including Adobe Premium CS and Final Cut Pro (I think) with all
> the media files for editing movies and graphics.  Unfortunately, it really
> can't get any smaller than this.

Just to be sure we have not misunderstood or we are missing details...

The disk on the master will not compress very well unless the unused
parts of the drive have been written with zeros.  You can do this
from OS X as root user.  For each partition containing your OS file system
(not for swap) you should fill it up with a bogus file containing zeros.
Zeroed raw data on the drive will compress very well.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero.bits

You don't need a bs or count value.  Just let it run until it
hits the wall and fills the disk partition.  Repeat for any
additional partitions.  Then rm the file /zero.bits file.

You might already be doing this but I thought it was worth repeating
because many people reporting large image sizes have not done
this step.  But in your case perhaps you really do have 20+ GB
of actual data on the drive due to the media editing suites or
related sample files.  Sorry if I'm repeating the known info,
but I didn't want you to miss this.

--Donald Teed