Looking for a 'Control distro'

chochem · 08-19-2008, 08:52 AM

Since I tend to have more than one distro installed at any one time, I'm considering using setting aside the second partition of my harddisk for a small 'control distrobution' which would mainly be in charge of GRUB and work as general fallback distro - also handy for small rescue and backup jobs. Ideally, I'd like to be able to have it automatically build the GRUB menu.lst from simply scanning the harddisk.

Can anyone make any recommendations? My main distro is Arch but I've got a lot of Uubntu experience too.

weibullguy · 08-19-2008, 11:17 AM

I keep a very minimal Gentoo install tucked away for a rainy day. I don't really know why I prefer that over a LiveCD, but I do. I'd go with something you could keep really stripped down; something you had real fine control over package dependencies. Something like a Gentoo, Slackware, Arch, or even (C)LFS if you just leave it alone. I'm sure there are other distributions that fit the bill, those a just the ones that I have some experience with.

chochem · 08-20-2008, 02:51 AM

Thanks for the suggestions. Eventually, I did a distro browsing on wikipedia but the closest I came was Finnix and that had recently stopped offering 'set up on hard disk' as an option, so I thought the better of it. I just ended up doing another Arch install. Which isn't really ideal as Arch is continually updated - something rock stable but frozen in time would probably be better.

syg00 · 08-20-2008, 02:59 AM

You don't have to do the "pacman -Su". Personally I find Arch ideal or this sort of thing.
Easy enough to re-install. Although I do keep a gentoo minimal around as a "quick fix" disk - has all I find I need usually to get things back up and running - regardless of the target system.

FredGSanford · 08-20-2008, 04:42 AM

That sounds like a job for a minimum debian. Just use the netinst cd for a bare minimum installation and it will add any other distro and any windows installed to its grub list. Then you can add other software that you need.

chochem · 08-21-2008, 07:40 AM

Yeah I noticed that FInnix was based on Debian and I figure that any and all recovery packages are bound to be in the repos, so that might be a good idea. If what you're saying about it being able to intelligently detect other partitions/distros, then it sounds perfect...