hey, I've been away from the forum awhile trying different distros, and I'm on Lunar Linux now. right now its been updating itself for a couple hours using the 'moonbase'. anyways, I was wondering if anyone else has given this distro a try, and if there's anything I should know? so far I haven't gotten to anything past the install and now updating. also, what are your opinions on the moonbase system? personally, with the little experience I've had with it, I like it a lot better than portage, but that's just IMHO. lastly, Lunar takes a cool approach by compiling every package on your system, not just unpacking archives of precompiles onto your system. This seems like a much better (although more time-consuming) approach, why don't more distros do this?

I used Lunar for a week, then decided to remove it and go for Arch.

While I liked the moonbase, and the ability to just "lvu what" to check what an app is/does before you go ahead and download it, but I had two problems:

1. As you mentioned, it just takes too long to install. It took me 3 hours to install XFree86 on a P3 500.

2. the moonbase doesn't have that many applications, compared to RPMs or Portage, or even pacman (which is much newer).

With Arch, you can get an up-and-running system in 30 mins (on that same P3 500, without X though), and it is an i686 optimised, so you won't get that much benefit of compiling something by yourself and waiting for hours.

You can also think of Pacman ( Arch's package manager ) as a moonbase, it uses a similar concept on updating a list of available packages from the server, and then compare it to what you have to see if you want to update anything. It will also try it's best to resolve any dependency problems.

If you like to see more about source-based distros, http://www.distrowatch.com/source.php

I am in the process of installing/configuring Lunar. Once I got the right combination of kernel and Lilo options and got it installed, it's been pretty smooth sailing. It probably helps I just recently set up Source Mage, since they are very similar. I have to say though, Lunar seems a bit smoother around the edges: network config worked, mozilla had configuration options to set up Java and Flash, proftpd works right off the bat with its standard config file, while I run into some troubles setting it up on Mage... little things like that. But compared to Gentoo I much prefer either Lunar or Mage. There might be fewer applications in moonbase, but so far I found everything I needed.

PS. Nothing wrong with Arch, either It runs on my other machine. My only gripe with Arch at the moment is it still doesn't seem to have Gnome 2.4. It's been in both Lunar and Mage for a while.