John wrote:
>>From time to time I've seen the comment on here that to get the most from
> linux it's best to install from scratch - kernel and then on up.
>
> As I'm about to go for a complete machine rebuild I'm tempted to try it but
> haven't had much luck finding a decent web page with complete instructions.
> One of my main concerns are lib files as distro's take a lot of the sweat out
> of that. Anyone know of one. Or have a better suggestion.
>
> Failing that I'm also wondering which distro uses the most vanilla and up to
> date set up and above all else updates with most ease. Suse likes to just
> ignore what was there and the update that are provided often cripple what
> ever is there.
>
The current situation isn't very good. The major commercial distros
aren't really GNU/Linux, but rather, OSes based on GNU/Linux.
Fedora was OK except that PAM was mandatory until they decided that they
would use SecureLinux. This seems to be an unsolvable problem since
features such as PAM and SecureLinux can not be made as optional
features. This means that there is no such thing as a "vanilla" distro.
IAC, the best way to do this is to do it backwards. Start with a distro
for the base and build stuff from source and working your way down from
the top. But, that just begs the question since you are still looking
for a "vanilla" distro.
So, although I do have a system that is basically scratch -- I still
have some Fedora RPMs (I started with version 1) but find that I had to
stop upgrading the RPMs with version 5 +/- and have had to replace them
with built from source except for the startup code and application packages.
You can try Linux From Scratch, but it is a lot of work. If that looks
like too much for you, I would try Gentoo Linux and after you are
comfortable with that, you can try LFS.
It would be very helpful if there was a base distro -- just enough to
boot and run an FTP client as a way to start, since building from
scratch means that you need to solve the bootstrap problem -- LFS shows
how to solve this, but you need to have something installed first to
build from scratch.
--
JRT
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