[CLUE-Tech] Escape from RH 8.0

[Collins]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 11:09 pm, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Mar 2003 21:58:08 -0700
>
> Collins <erichey2 at attbi.com> wrote:
> > > The biggest barrier to switching to something like Debian or SuSe
> > > though, is simple familiarity, and the fact that I have a running
> > > system built around the decisions I made when I intially built it
> > > (using Gentus --- a tweaked RH). I don't look forward to spending the
> > > time to make the switch. My expectation is that trying to install
> > > another distro over the top of RH will leave me with a mess of stuff
> > > in differing locations, which I will never get cleaned up. I think I'd
> > > be better of waiting until I can build a new machine.
> >
> > Agreed on all of this.  Unless you've got spare partitions to build a
> > new system on the side, it's probably better not to mess up your running
> > system.  With gentoo or LFS (and I'm sure a few others), however, you
> > can build a system in a spare partition in chroot mode without much
> > interferance for your running system, as long as you have the cpu power
> > and the bandwidth for downloads.
>
> Well, I have few spare gigs of disk space, about 28 or so. It's sorta
> spread around, but I could easily create a container file, mount it via
> loopback, and build on that. Or try my hand at parted (which I've never
> done), although that makes me a bit woozy as I'm not up to par with
> backups. Using the container file sounds a bit safer. Now I'm starting to
> wonder if I could mess with that, even to the point of trying the kernel
> with User-Mode Linux -- hmm, maybe even Xnest? I'll have to cogitate on
> that notion. Thanks for mentioning it.
>

All you need is about 3-5 gigs contiguous space to get started with gentoo or 
LFS or even Slackware.  My gentoo system is just over 3 gig including my 
/home partition (email, etc.) with kde and various browsers (plus plugins) 
and gimp and sane and samba and lprng installed.  Gentoo recommends a tiny 
/boot partition as well, but you can get by without it.

I recommend gentoo, of course, but with any of the above you can get a clean 
install without the bastardization that RH is currently attempting.  Even a 
current Mandrake would not be bad, but Mandrake installs so much crap by 
default that you have a lot of trimming to do. or you will have a very 
sluggish system.  

If you or anyone else wants it, I have a Mandrake 9.0 cdrom (installed without 
a hitch on my HP PIII machine) that I got free with a British linux mag.  I 
could also burn a gentoo Livecd for anyone who needs it.  

As the old saying goes, you pays you money (in my case, zippo), you takes you 
chances.

Best of luck.
-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
Athlon-XP gentoo 1.4_rc2 kde 3.1