I sort of asked this question in the arch linux forums since I was interested in arch but I still have yet to get a response (maybe it's too early).

I wan't something like gentoo but without taking up unnecessary space like gentoo's portage does (/usr/portage/). I find that to be a serious flaw with gentoo. Yes you can use squashfs-unionfs to help but it requires some work especially when something goes wrong with portage.

I was thinking about arch but can you use it completely as a source based distro? Some people seem to have said it requires scripting and some work from the user. I wan't something that'll do it for me so I can set it and forget it.

I heard about source mage linux and exherbo but I'm not sure what to think. I'm thinking about trying arch linux and source mage but perhaps there's other distro's I don't know about. I'd really like some suggestions.

Any help would be appreciated thanks!

Greetingz!

Well, the problem with a source-based Linux distribution is, no matter how you look at it, you're going to need a place to stuff all of the source code. However, it sounds like "funtoo" might be right up your alley. it has a Git-based Portage tree and a "funtoo overlay".

Check it out and give it a shot.

Have a look at Sabayon: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sabayon

Well I tried arch linux. It was great until I decided to start recompiling things. I used pacbuilder and then tried srcpac (I.M.O. src pac is a little better) but had trouble after recompiling - installing glibc. I updated headers, then I recompiled glibc and installed it, and after that issues. It just didn't wanna compile gcc or anything and I just didn't feel like messing with it. It woulda been perfect too! I know glibc is a very sensitive thing but it just didn't seem as straight forward as when I did all this with slackware. And slackware is a pain in the butt to tell you the truth! Arch seems even more bleeding edge than gentoo. I really liked arch alot despite this issue but damn... You can't always make a bin based distro source based I guess. The potential is really there but...

I read up on funtoo and it seemed awesome (and it doesn't replace gentoo). However I couldn't emerge anything! I kept getting sha256 checksum failures on everything. I avoided redownloading the kernel repeatedly and manually extracted it (which went fine) and set it up. I'm pretty sure I did things right. Everything else afterward kept giving the same issue... Damn!

So I don't know if the forces are against me or what but I'll just go back to gentoo again. I still like it and I kinda feel better about going back to it. It seems refreshing now lol.

I'm gonna try sabayon next but it seems kinda hard to customize doesn't it? Is it in sync with gentoo? What about crux? Source mage linux sounds good but for some reason it doesn't seem. Uh. Trust worthy? Lol I don't know...

If you want real customisation, try the CDX version of Sabayon. You get the kernel and utilities, a window manager, a text editor, lynx, a terminal emulator, and the package manager. After that, you're on your own.