I haven't looked to see if it's possible but I wondered if one of the bootable cd/dvds could be used to install source to a hard drive. I suspect that knopix might be the best bet. My basic idea was to install dual boot, a kernel,shell etc and so on up to KDE. Once I have that other things aren't a problem. I find that the suse distro for instance often doesn't have what I want on it. For me the best source repository is google etc -> sourceforge or the authors web page. The problem for me is that I would need some concise help about options and installation - not the usual verbose stuff that's about which is why I asked about web links. It's a pity KDE doesn't do it's own un supported distro. That would be wonderful. Just KDE's normal apps and nothing else except maybe cups. 2 such installations on a machine would leave something to go back to if things got messed up or the latest KDE proved unsuitable for a while until its sorted out. Developers might find it useful as a test bench standard too. It could even make upwards migration easier. If any one is tempted I would hope they would also add the facilities for dual booting an existing windoze partitions though. Unfortunately I have to use it from time to time and have a feeling from the specs that a vm will cripple my cpu. John On Wednesday 30 January 2008 01:23, James Richard Tyrer wrote: > 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. -- Regards John Suse 10.0 KDE 3.4.2 B ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.