On Friday, January 21, 2011 10:36:00 pm Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> The problem with many of these special purpose distros is that they are
> usually poorly maintained wrt updates. A minimal install of a mainstream
> distro like CentOS shouldn't take up much more than a GB, and if you put
> in some effort to strip out excess packages even half of that. DSL is
> really more of a distro to put on embedded hardware.
With CentOS 4 i586 available, I like that route best.
This keeps even the embedded stuff (that's at least i586) using the same admin interfaces, the same file locations, and in general it keeps things consistent. Consistency in user and admin interfaces is a good thing and helps admin productivity, at least in my case. That's partly the reason I run Fedora on my laptop; I run CentOS on my servers, and having my own machine running something fairly close helps me get things done quicker, and I'm less likely to mistype things.
So I'm not likely to use DSL or Puppy or similar on systems that are big enough to run CentOS 4 i586 at the least.
Now on really small storage (DiskOnChip for instance) things are completely different, and specialized distributions are useful. But if I have enough storage I'll run C4 (C4 is powering the majority of the servers here at the moment; we're transitioning somewhat slowly to C5 and soon to C6 for those cases that need it). No rush on most of the C4 boxen, though. As mentioned, I still have C3 and C2.1 in production, although that's slowly changing, and I try to be careful.
Now, when C4 is no longer supported, the choice of i586 distribution might change. See, i586 distributions are required for some fairly modern hardware, too, like much of the VIA embedded lines, which don't have CMOV.
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