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native POSIX threads (needs to be enabled in the glibc with an adon package, and probably all packages recompiled against it..., but) look here if you fancy setting it up yourself. i've heard of unbelieveable speedups on threaded code using this library, which will not work on a 2.4.x kernel.

The point of my post is that emerge, rc-update and other handy tools in addition to the default gnome2 desktop would make it a good distribution for newbies as well.

After installing Gentoo, there isn't much that you need to be a Guru for, so too bad you have to choose between "easy to use" or "easy to install".

I've installed Gentoo for people that would not been able to do it, and they've been happy with it.. that that it's necessarily bad that someone has to get the system in a "startup condition" before letting the newbie in.. at least there won't be extra services before the newbie learns how to install them :)

I know, for video-game funs it sounds weird, but old guys who played adventure games on old TTY mainframe terminals will understand what I mean.

Well, Gentoo is nice I must admit.. but my Linux distro of choice is Linux From Scratch

The best idea would probably be to install a temporary linux distribution. You'll need to repartition your drive any way. You could also look in the hints section - a couple of these might be helpful to you.

No because you get -1 DidNotPostLinksCorrectly :P

Here
are
the
mirrors
for
your
enjoyment,
mein
gut
freund :).

Since /. purposefully screws up any url you post in the text, it helps people very much if you make real links. :P

Also I find it ironic that VA would boot the LFS project off their servers and then /. the new server. That is kind of funny, in a perverse sort of way.

No because you get -1 DidNotPostLinksCorrectly :P

Here
are
the
mirrors
for
your
enjoyment,
mein
gut
freund :).

Since /. purposefully screws up any url you post in the text, it helps people very much if you make real links. :P

Also I find it ironic that VA would boot the LFS project off their servers and then /. the new server. That is kind of funny, in a perverse sort of way.

No because you get -1 DidNotPostLinksCorrectly :P

Here
are
the
mirrors
for
your
enjoyment,
mein
gut
freund :).

Since /. purposefully screws up any url you post in the text, it helps people very much if you make real links. :P

Also I find it ironic that VA would boot the LFS project off their servers and then /. the new server. That is kind of funny, in a perverse sort of way.

No because you get -1 DidNotPostLinksCorrectly :P

Here
are
the
mirrors
for
your
enjoyment,
mein
gut
freund :).

Since /. purposefully screws up any url you post in the text, it helps people very much if you make real links. :P

Also I find it ironic that VA would boot the LFS project off their servers and then /. the new server. That is kind of funny, in a perverse sort of way.

No because you get -1 DidNotPostLinksCorrectly :P

Here
are
the
mirrors
for
your
enjoyment,
mein
gut
freund :).

Since /. purposefully screws up any url you post in the text, it helps people very much if you make real links. :P

Also I find it ironic that VA would boot the LFS project off their servers and then /. the new server. That is kind of funny, in a perverse sort of way.

No because you get -1 DidNotPostLinksCorrectly :P

Here
are
the
mirrors
for
your
enjoyment,
mein
gut
freund :).

Since /. purposefully screws up any url you post in the text, it helps people very much if you make real links. :P

Also I find it ironic that VA would boot the LFS project off their servers and then /. the new server. That is kind of funny, in a perverse sort of way.

No because you get -1 DidNotPostLinksCorrectly :P

Here
are
the
mirrors
for
your
enjoyment,
mein
gut
freund :).

Since /. purposefully screws up any url you post in the text, it helps people very much if you make real links. :P

Also I find it ironic that VA would boot the LFS project off their servers and then /. the new server. That is kind of funny, in a perverse sort of way.

I wouldn't actually go too far down this route: I would stick to the Slackware-supplied glibc, gcc and such like for the same reasons that the Pure LFS hint exists. Some interesting things can happen to the toolchain doing stuff like that.

Not sure if I'm actually making any sense, but I think I do...:)

I don't consider myself a guru, but 'I would say I know enough'. I've done the whole LFS/source based distro thing for a while now so here's my take on things.

I think it's important to make a distinction between LFS and Gentoo/SGL/Sourcemage/Lunar/uPM. LFS is a book that describes the process of producing a minimal linux installation that is capable of building software. The source based distros provide scripts/tools that automate the build process for you. Which you choose is largly dependent on your needs.

It seems from your post that you are interested in learning what makes GNU/Linux tick: what files do what, what software is required and what's bloat, and generally what goes on under the hood. For this I found that there is no substitute for LFS, it took me from Mandrake newbie to power-user in a couple of months. This was a good few years ago and at the time there was no BLFS, I feel that that actually helped me with learning the stuff. LFS held my hand through the installation of the base system, but after that I was forced to RTFM, making my own mistakes and learning from them. After 2 or 3 months I had a fully functional system with KDE, apache and a bunch of other stuff. I also had learned many times more than I did in over a year of using mandrake.

My new shiney LFS system was a joy to behold, but it became a real pain to maintain. I found that an unacceptable portion of my time was spent updating software manually and it was effecting my productivity. This was around the same time that SGL first appeared on freshmeat. I had tinkered for a while with LFSmake but found that it wasn't flexible enough. SGL was wonderful, I traded a small amount of the total control that LFS gave me for a system that saved me 80% of the time I was spending on keeping my system up to date.

Unfortunatley there was a bit of a storm in the SGL teacup which resulted in SGL going offline for a while and 2 forks appearing (Sourcemage and Lunar). Initially I went with Sourcemage but I found that after a while it became too unstable and as I was using it for work I couldn't have that (it may well be better now, I've not checked it out in a while). I switched to Lunar and am still using it now. It doesn't provide the same education as LFS, but once that knowledge is aquired it provides a much more efficient means of installing/maintaining your system.

I should say that I did once try gentoo but I was put off by the complete lack of an installer. You have to jump through too many hoops (and triangles, hexagons and other polyhedra) to get the thing up and running. uPM also looks interesting but is still in a relativly eary stage of development.

To sum it all up: LFS cannot be beaten for it's educational value, but for day-to-day use Lunar suits me best.

on a more helpfull level, i point you to an absolute minimal LFS hint

And there just might be information that's only available there. I used to run two LFS systems (for the learning experience) but now I'm using Gentoo. I still visit the LFS Hints often, especially when I can't find something quickly on the Gentoo forums. There's guides to cryptographic file systems, effectively using SSH, printing with CUPS, and lots more good stuff. Check out the "How to build a Pure LFS, which is based on comments/criticism from Alan Cox.

Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] is not a disto, but a set of instructions for building a GNU/Linux system from little more than an existing distro. The Beyond Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] project builds on this tradition, providing instructions for installing a number of other packages.

Having said that, I would recommend that anyone serious about furthering their knowledge of Linux, and at least 750MB of free hard disk space should give it a go. I got into Linux back in '93, and knew quite a lot. Then I stumbled across Linux From Scratch (LFS) - I didn't realise how much I didn't know until finishing my first complete build.

I now run an number of LFS-based systems at home and at work, and have never looked back.

BTW, I am typing this on my Gentoo [gentoo.org], 1.4_rc4 build. :-)

Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] is not a disto, but a set of instructions for building a GNU/Linux system from little more than an existing distro. The Beyond Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org] project builds on this tradition, providing instructions for installing a number of other packages.

Having said that, I would recommend that anyone serious about furthering their knowledge of Linux, and at least 750MB of free hard disk space should give it a go. I got into Linux back in '93, and knew quite a lot. Then I stumbled across Linux From Scratch (LFS) - I didn't realise how much I didn't know until finishing my first complete build.

I now run an number of LFS-based systems at home and at work, and have never looked back.

BTW, I am typing this on my Gentoo [gentoo.org], 1.4_rc4 build. :-)

So do it. (Although I don't like a lot of the ideas in the article much)

... that doesn't reside in a space heater? Sure, I would like a faster computer than my current Athlon 500, but the high energy consumption, which leads to excess heat which leads to noisy fans xor fried chips (which may be good in England but not here in the States), is getting out-of-hand crazy.

I feel sorry for all the gamers out there that must buy all these $1000 space heaters every year or two just to continue their gaming fix. Outside of gaming, are even 1% of these systems even close to fully utilized? I seriously doubt it.

I understand that my needs are different from the average desktop owner. I use my computer to play DVDs, encode/decode OGGs, download and watch movie trailers and other video, and compile bucket loads of free software packages via linux from scratch. I even try a little development myself. However, for these tasks, I have found that the optimum computer remains a CPU from about 1998 or 1999. And if you have a few hundred dollars, maxing the memory of an old Athlon or P3 and replacing the IDE drives with SCSI ones leads to a surprisingly fast system.

WORK per DOLLAR is important, but it's not the only thing. Personally, I rate WORK per ENGERGY CONSUMPTION even higher. And even more important than WORK per ENGERGY CONSUMPTION is the REALIZED WORK per ENGERGY CONSUMPTION, which takes into account the fact that the average desktop machine just sits at 95% idle most of the time.

This is exactly why my computer remains an original Athlon (500MHz). It's fast enough to play DVDs and encode/decode OGGs. Hell, I even run a linux from scratch system, which means I frequently must compile huge software packages. Sure, it may take a day to compile all the packages for the latest KDE release (as opposed to an hour or so), but my computer makes almost no noise and blows cool air out the back. And I don't feel like I'm wasting a significant amount of electricity keeping my system up 24/7.

I think I may be missing something.

you say that you have "administered Linux web servers for several years." but:

- you don't know that the window manager and the underlying OS are different?

- you don't understand how to make the distro install work?

- you were surprised that you had to do some research when you tried to do something in linux that you had never done before?

- you were not sure what distribution you were going to install, based on your own knowledge?

I've only ever used two distros (RedHat 6, then that pissed me off and I installed LinuxFromScratch), but the first three of these are issues that I had figured out by the end of the FIRST week when I started using linux about 4 years ago.

admitedly the last issue took me a good year to figure out, but at that point it was an academic decision, not a research project to choose my next distro.

I did have the same problem when I tried to install my Lexmark Z51 about a month ago. but I knew I was ignorant on how to do what I needed to do, and I knew it was going to take a while to get things working. none of these ever caught me off gaurd.

I have never managed a web server, print server, ftp server, or any other kind of server. in fact, aside from managing my own at-home system, the only computer-related work i have ever done is about two-months of assistant administrator (in a win2k environment) between when I received my BS in CS and when I went off to the Navy's nuclear power school in Charleston, SC about 3 years ago. but the issues you pointed out, together with your surprise that they popped up, does not seem to jive with my experiences.

all that being said, i will agree with you that linux is not ready for prime time, despite what anybody ever will say. it should "just work." it should support most of the hardware that's out there actually in use. I should be able to configure everything via GUI, *if* I so chose. the big-ticket items (priting, networking, and major applications) MUST ABSOLUTELY WORK (printing is NOT there yet, the other two are close enough to be viable). we have some work to do. we are not there yet. but we are improving -- when I first started with linux, networking was just coming up to speed and office applications were cumbersome at best. and in only 4 years, we're at least close.

weylin

All pre-packaged distros suck. Build your own linux distro... from scratch.

(Chicken-v.-Egg Warning: You'll need a working linux system to build one from scratch.)

I started compiling from source two weeks ago and just built Mozilla last night! w00t!

That becomes a non-issue if you always build your oft-used services from source. Yeah, I know, with larger server farms it's a pain in the arse.

Try checking out Linux From Scratch.

Build your own server distro and you'll never have to worry who goes down the tubes!

Just because it's broken on Linux doesn't mean that:

* it's not better on other platforms
* the other tools aren't worse

Elizabeth Zwicky's classic Torture-testing Backup and Archive Programs will give a whole list of reasons why you should be suspicious of tar or cpio.

Heck, the FreeBSD Handbook answers the question "Which backup program is best?" by saying "dump(8). Period."

Anyway, if you're reasonably proficient with Linux, then you could check out http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ to see about putting together an installation with only the stuff you need and save a GigaByte or so of disk space.

Or just install DOS 6.22 and include a line in autoexec to start up Wolfenstein :-)

The Linux From Scratch book has a cvs system in place, and automatically converts to html, xml, txt, ext from the sources (which are TeX now iirc).

just incase i lost anyone there, check out an example here of what i mean:

LFS Archive

Maybe some people have, but not me. Some distributions have decent package managers.

Wrong. Yoper is essentially the latest CVS version of LFS with an installer.

Which one stands head and shoulders above the rest? Any suggestions?

If you want it done right, do it yourself:

Linux From Scratch

Agreed, but not for what he wants. On my 1Gig machine with 256M of RAM, Knoppix is useable, but does drag at times. Mostly this is due to lack of swap, but having worked with Linux for a long time, I don't see that making enough of a difference to have it useable on a 486, or even a PII.

A better option would be to look at Linux from Scratch. He could build his own distribution that'll work on every one of those machines. A small, floppy-based distro might be a lot of work, but it can be done. Building LFS with no locale support and using ucLibc I was able to get a distro that was under 70M. Keep in mind, however, that it was fully-functional (albeit sans X), so with some work, it could be pared down a bit more.

If you've ever installed a Linux distribution, you will immediately note the number of third-party libraries and applications installed on a 'base' system. This is frustrating for me, because for the most part I may not want all those extra applications installed, because it clutters up the system, and there may be various vulnerabilities present that I'll be open to.

Is:

1. No Windows tax

2. A simple cheatsheet listing the kernel options needed to support the hardware.

Why do you even need that? Dell laptops come with really common hardware (stuff like ATI Rage Mobility). All you need is the manual they give you. In fact, it's not any harder to look at the manual, since they organize the basic specs together.

Gentoo sure has taken off. Good for you guys. I'll stick with the only distro I can handle. LFS - your distro, your rules :)

tell us how you did it!

The steps:

1. Install Linux
2. Connect to the 'net
3. Install Apache, configure.
4. Set up documents to serve

and complie full J2SE 1.4.1 SDK for linux using gcc3

This isn't necessarily a good thing for sun in short term because it draws press attention to java's failure on the desktop.
However, if microsoft are forced to keep suns latest JRE as part of the standard windows install for a a few years (as the case drags on) then this will be a huge win for Sun.

java has arguably already won the enterprise-server-app war with the entire industry of players oracle,ibm,macromedia,... currently allied versus the beast and will probably win the handheld/mobile battle unless microsoft can defeat sonyErricson, nokia, sharp and palm... Java is currently a huge success everywhere but the desktop.

(aside)
Why has java failed on the desktop.... not just because of the redmond crew but because swing is 'kin huge bloated and considered slow. Swing will always be slow relative to naitive, but I love it because it stays ideologically pure to the spirit of write once run the same anywhere. Its fairly obvious that sun were looking at a 10 year roadmap when they released swing coz its gonna take that long before swing apps run imperceiveably slower than native apps (and no doubt will still look like shit by default). However, a machine shipping with XP today will be able to run swing applications ok.
(/aside)

Its only recent PC hardware that has began to run Swing at an acceptable speed. The timing of this ruling could make desktop java very compelling if it as seamlessly integrated into XP.2003 as it is in OSX

anyways i'm gonna carry on compiling my own p4 optimized sun j2SDK for Linux from source code using gcc3.. "export INSANE=true"woo hoo!

1.Check out photomessa. Its a free (as in beer, the toolkit is under Mozilla Public Licence), small and useful zoomable image browser
2.Install photomessa using java webstart (quick, easy, secure)
3.rethink your java speed prejudices

I agree with you, but what sets Mandrake apart are the programs that they *did* write (install, *drake, etc) - they are the reason you use Mandrake, over say, RedHat or Slack. Nothing wrong with this - everyone uses some distro - I'd say that less than 0.1% of the hardest of the hardcore Linux advocates on Slashdot have built their Linux install from scratch (of course, if you look at sites like LinuxFromScratch.org, even they use the "bootstrap" approach, requiring a distro)

And btw, _my_ rule of thumb is being conservative in what produce and conservative in what I accept - just send me an email containing some spam phrases and you'll see what I mean.

<WARNING>
According to the financial institutions, the following hack makes your browser insecure. IMO, it is no more insecure than using MS-IIS (along with its security history) as the server for financial sites;) You have been warned. Many sites use an MS-IE specific tag (autocomplete=off) to prevent autocomplete from working in some forms. This tag is now supported in mozilla to appease the financial institutions. As per the requirements of the financial institutions, they will not even accept a solution where this a preference option. My opinion is that it should be in the hands of the user. To enable autocomplete to bypass this restriction, we need to make a slight modification in the code. Note that this modification is also available as a patch.
</WARNING>

<HACK>
Open the file $MOZ_SRC/extensions/wallet/src/wallet.cpp and search for the line
#define WALLET_DONT_CACHE_ALL_PASSWORDS
and delete or comment out the line.
</HACK>

Could people PLEASE stop addressing this kind of problems to Linux. Linux has NOTHING to do with these "problems" it's solely a packaging problem, which is the role of the distributer to get right.

It is ridiculous to compare Linux and MS-Windows. What MS-Windows and Linux are you comparing, the latest?
That would be MS-Windows XP Pro and Linux-2.4.21 ?

Now, I guess you are referring to a generic distribution which is the sum of all distributions you have seen. Problem is that "Generic Linux 1.0" is a freak. It an absolutely idiotic way of doing an OS, we ALL agree on that one. That is also why nobody has made "Generic Linux 1.0" (not counting LFS).

Now I haven't seen RedHat lately. so I can be wrong. but I guess that if you compare RedHat and MS-Windows you are mostly wrong.

I use SpamAssassin, combined with some scripts available here. Since I implemented this system last month, I have gotten exactly one piece of spam, and it got through because the body contained nothing except a URL.

Enjoying my severance pay and catching up on house work. I WAS throwing together another lfs system, but my PII finally bit the dust and I lack the $$$ to replace it.

Anyone looking for an Embedded Linux guy in San Diego?

Whoops, forgot the links:

LFS

Slackware

Too easy.

LFS
That's where I wish I'd started.

Well, I'm still using my overclocked 486SX/25 (now at 33 MHz) with 16 MB RAM everyday. It's running a distribution built from scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org) and it has got all the speed I need.

I run ClarkConnect on my firewall. Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, Lunar and Slackware on my *personal* box. Lycoris on my wife's box (no humorous responses please).
While the individual merits of each distro can be argued to no end, I do have to note that only Lycoris and ClarkConnect (Based om RH 7.2) worked perfectly out of the box. (Inasmuch as Windoze does)
Noting that, I would say that if you want to learn the differences between the distros, you should first learn how to multi-boot your machine. The greatest learning experience for me has been to have a working distro available at all times, while I'm trying to get a new (to me) distro working that I'm not familiar with. (Such as linux-from-scratch)
Anyway, I hope I haven't strayed too far from the subject, but I had to add my $.02.
In short, IMHO, if you are a complete newbie, learn how to multi-boot, install Lycoris, Mandrake and Debian. (or go to DistroWatch and pick a couple.) Graduate from one to the next while keeping your working distro intact. Then, Paraphrasing another post I read "apt-get when you finally get it together" - lol.
Happy Thanksgiving!

The solution for me: Linux From Scratch. Build exactly what you need into your system, nothing more!

The Linux From Scratch book is written in XML and the other formats (e.g. HTML) are generated from the XML source.