Hi, Another option is Gentoo. It is very different from Slackware in that you build most packages from source, but it is largely based on the BSD ports system as well. I'm not familiar with the distro Robert mentioned but I would bet that it's based on Gentoo Portage. The .ebuild files are plain text, similar to Makefiles but different. All of Portage uses Python unless they changed it. You can build whatever packages you want, including Gnome or anything they offer an ebuild for which is everything you can think of. I still prefer Debian myself but Gentoo is a close second in many areas. The philosophy of Gentoo is choice. You're rarely stuck using one particular set of packages, unlike Debian and most other distros. There are two or three different cron and syslog implementations for example. You can build every single library from source or use the stage 2 or 3 installs which prebuild some of them for you. I found it slightly faster than Debian also but that could've been the processor. The reason why I don't run it now is that packages are constantly being updated, similar to Debian testing or unstable and I couldn't keep up. You really need to update your ports tree on a daily basis if you want the latest packages. Also, I'm pretty sure it uses the BSD way of init and config files, not SysV like Debian but I'm not 100% positive on that. Robert Spangler wrote: > If you like Slackware, you should have a look at Arch Linux. It is > very simple like Slackware but more advanced with a package manager, > BSD-like port system, and more.
