On 17 March 2016 at 11:39, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
If rather than resizing the partition initially to the full 8GB, you just increased it a bit, to give you enough room for your mods (4 1/2?) Then tweak you install, then image the 4.5gb partition, then you're sorted and don't have to tweak dd or limit anything.
The default image has enough space for my needs, because there's enough pre-installed stuff that I uninstall anyway that gives me about 1GB free (and I need next to nothing for my purposes).
But if I did what you suggest that still leads me back to the original question but with a twist as I'm not sure how to calculate the size of image to create using dd. Presumably it's everything up to the end of the used partitions, which I guess I can get from fdisk?
Keeping to the size of the original image avoids a calculation but I'm still looking for confirmation that this will do what I expect. "Try it and see" is the obvious answer but just because it seems to work doesn't mean I haven't stored up problems for later.