Installing Lightweight Python

[geremy condra]

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Nima <nima.irt at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to install python on an embedded system. It's a powerful x86-
> based computer with the only limitation of having a small-size flash
> ROM as its secondary storage. So there is no hard drive and the system
> is booted from the flash memory.
> The operating system, BusyBox (a flavor of Linux), and other
> applications occupy most of the flash memory. As the subject implies,
> Python isn't already installed on the box. I tried to compile/install
> python on a Linux box which roughly took 60MB of the memory. The
> maximum amount of Flash memory I'm permitted to use is about 10-20 MB.
> Is there a light-weight implementation of python which I could use? Is
> there a way to remove unnecessary modules?
> BTW,
> + I'm supposed to write a web management interface for this system
> (using python).
> + I know how to use Google!
> + I'm a newbie, so please be gentle :)
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>

I'm not an expert, but there are probably a large-ish number of modules
you could remove without much sacrifice on your part. Looking at the
module list and just picking the platform-dependent ones:

* _winreg
* aepack
* aetools
* aetypes
* AL
* al
* applesingle
* autoGIL
* buildtools
* Carbon
* cd
* cfmfile
* chunk
* colorpicker
* etc
* etc
* etc

You could also probably remove things like 2to3, tabnanny, etc,
and I doubt tkinter is doing you much good.

I also recall someone at pycon talking about importing modules
from a .zip archive. I'm not sure how easy/hard that is, but you
may want to look at PEP 302.

Geremy Condra