<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'>If you want to learn more about Linux without quite as much work, you could try Arch Linux. The install gives you a bare-bones command-line system. You need to install X11, etc, yourself. There are guides to help you set everything up. Afterwards, you have a rolling distro that you can keep up to date by running "pacman -Syu" occasionally. Packages seem to be updated very quickly.<br><br>It also has a BSD portage-style system called AUR to install packages that aren't part of the official packages. I used it to install GNU Smalltalk this weekend.<br><br>One caveat: Arch is more of a cutting-edge system, so there is the chance that something won't work right, but I have also experienced that with Ubuntu.<br><br>----- Original Message -----<br>From: "adam bultman" <adamb@glaven.org><br>To: "CLUE technical discussion" <clue-tech@cluedenver.org><br>Sent: Monday, January 4, 2010 11:39:44 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain<br>Subject: Re: [clue-tech] Gentoo<br><br>I used gentoo for quite a while; while I didn't have the fastest system<br>in the world, I couldn't really tell if it was "faster" or not.<br><br>I did however learn a lot about bootstrapping, fixing broken packages<br>(if any), tweaking things, and all that. It was a very useful<br>experience, and I used it for quite a while until I simply had no more<br>time to spend working on things - and waiting for things when I wanted<br>them (for example, I remember Openoffice taking 11 hours to compile -<br>quite a bit of lag time to open a simple excel spreadsheet.)<br><br>One thing to keep in mind when using gentoo - you need to do etc-update<br>any time you update a package, and etc-update is a fairly time consuming<br>process in itself, since if you make changes, you need to make sure that<br>anything you changed gets put into the new version - and if you don't be<br>careful, you can quickly have yourself a non-booting machine, or at<br>least a severely malfunctioning one.<br><br>If you do any benchmarking, and happen to have any benchmarks for when<br>that box was another distro, let me know. I'd like to know if it is<br>"faster" from a benchmarking standpoint, since I didn't always notice<br>things on the desktop.<br><br>Adam<br><br>Jason Ash wrote:<br>> Hi,<br>><br>> As some of you know, I tried out LFS last fall. While this was a great<br>> learning experience, sorting out and installing all of the<br>> dependencies for things like KDE was a headache. Not to mention I<br>> couldn't get KDE to work. Four valid reasons to do LFS (IMHO) are:<br>> 1) The learning experience (the best reason)<br>> 2) Specific custom requirements (not me)<br>> 3) Exercising technical know-how (not yet there)<br>> 4) Micromanagement of your OS (I won't)<br>><br>> I remember someone saying at one of our meetings that he uses Gentoo<br>> because it's optimized and he never has to upgrade (since portage is<br>> always up-to-date). So, I just got finished installing the Gentoo base<br>> system, and I'm installing the KDE4 meta-package. The nice thing about<br>> Gentoo is that it automatically downloads all the needed dependencies<br>> in addition to the requested package and compiles them from source.<br>> I'm using -O2 and pentium4 optimizations. So far, KDE4 in its entirety<br>> has taken 26 hours to download and compile. I'll let you know how it<br>> goes and if it's faster.<br>><br>> Thanks,<br>> Jason Ash<br>> _______________________________________________<br>> clue-tech mailing list<br>> clue-tech@cluedenver.org<br>> http://www.cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue-tech<br>> <br><br>-- <br>Adam<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>clue-tech mailing list<br>clue-tech@cluedenver.org<br>http://www.cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue-tech<br></div></body></html>