The default OpenLayers.js file, minified, weighs in at a whopping 943kb uncompressed. With gzip compression it's still over 200kb, so we're building a stripped-down copy with just what we need. Docs on how the stripping process works: http://docs.openlayers.org/library/deploying.html To recreate this OpenLayers.js file: # get yui-compressor (install from apt, or set up a shell script or alias to the jar) # download and decompress OpenLayers-2.10 zip or tgz make clean && make If necessary, change the relative path to the OpenLayers source directory in the Makefile.