distro inquiry

[Duane Attaway]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, Matt Luettgen wrote:

> I'm looking into building a distro.  I have a few complaints about the
> current distros but do realize there are also a lot of good features in
> them.  I'm trying to compile a list of complaints/rants/raves on current
> distro's to get a good idea of what 'the perfect distro' would be.  I
> know there will be conflicts so lets not turn this into a flame war.  
> I'm just looking for input on where to steer this to.

I wish I had a rant about this, but I'll try my best.  I have been happy
lately.

I found many of the new minimalistic distributions appear to be answers to
many of the fustrations older distributions created. They appear to have
been started to answer specific needs that would be impractical with
current distributions.  Gone are the headaches of RPM and other package
managers.  Welcome to that "you're on your own" adventure!

I have found mini distributions are great for learning how to roll my own
creation.  They start out with the basics and easily accomodate more
packages as needed.  Maintainers of many mini distros are rapidly learning
themselves and often are happy to share their experiences.

As an example, my favorite distribution to modify for my own needs is
warlinux.  This guy took the elements and created a boot disk that not
only gets pcmcia up, it initilizes wi-fi cards, and provides a rich shell
full of tools for troubleshooting any network.  Like many other new
distros, he provides the source iso, you can see how he built up his
system.

Gentoo is my favorite vice.  It allows me to take a minimalist system and
quickly customize it to maximum features of my desire in a highly tuned
manner.  I like tarballs as they are easily accessable images of a
package.  The magic of Gentoo's easy to read python scrips allows these
tarballs to be treated as packages.  The system lets me take one or
thousands of tarballs with one command for easy installation with all
required dependencies, configurations, or removal from my system
automatically.  And it has a powerful search command to find the strange
things I need.  That's everything I want from a packaging system.  And it
does this with scripts written in easy to read python.

If the target computer is a slow one, I nfs mount it from a faster
computer to offload the cpu cycles required for compiling the world.  

With over 13GB worth of tarballs to choose from, I do not feel limited
when I need something.  And these tarballs are not gentoo specific; they
are the author's original tarballs with matching md5sums that can be used
in any distribution.  Its a good resource.

Ooops, I didn't rant.  Even worse, I raved.  Sorry!

--
http://dattaway.org