Another "which distro for me" thread...

Hey,

Boring old question I know but I've searched the forum and I couldn't find anyone asking for the same thing as me so here we go. I want a very basic distro, all I want is a command-line to boot into with all the utils like make, bison and things like mkdir and the rest. I'd rather compile everything myself rather than use binary packages or something like portage (not very happy with that atm ).

I thought of Debian and maybe APT would be better than portage but I've heard Debian has really stupid config files. Linux From Scratch sounds cool but I was told it was more a learning tool than a production-environment distro. The computer will ultimately be a desktop machine but I do a little programming and a lot of mucking around.

Any suggestions for a system that will give me a console and binutils and a bootloader would be greatly appreciated

You are pretty much describing Linux from Scratch, it is an excellent reference to guide you through building your own customized distribution.

*edit* I'm an idiot I didn't see that part your wrote about LFS.

However, I find that LFS makes a fine distribution. I build everything from source, and as long as I keep up with security advisories everything is fine. I used it for a while as a web and mail server, and have recently converted it to a desktop system. So in my opinion it is an excellent dist, and not just for learning, I use it to write and test most of my software.

I personally don't think Debian has 'stupid' config files and think it makes an excellent base system.

However that's just my opinion.

Anyway with that in mind I would also suggest Arch, it has the excellent pacman for package management and can create a very versitile base system. It has some very neat config files that are easy to edit and uses the bsd style init (which may be more your liking). It is also very easy to build your own packages.

Edit: Arch is i686 optimised - so you need reasonably modern hardware.

Regards

Shmonkey

I have tried Slackware 10 and Fedora Core 2. Then I tried LFS and I love it. I like having total control and it works great as a production distro. You just have to have patience I suppose, and it's not for everybody. As far as package management, I use the suggested package user method and I also really enjoy this. But as I said, this is only "suggested". You could use any system you want. Just look at the LFS slogan: Your distro, your rules.