A Clean Linux Install?

linux_penguin asks: "I've been using Linux for a few years now, and have only just hit the wall I believe most intermediate users hit at some time... I hate RPM and all of its idiosyncracies, and I hate all the clutter and unnecessary junk most distributions install. I wanted to compile Enlightenment from CVS, and it turned into a major hassle due to RPM dependencies and libraries being spread everywhere. What I would like to achieve is an absolute basic install, and then build the system up slowly with source (with most stuff being installed into /usr/local hopefully, leaving the basic install clean and untouched). I know this is a fairly tall order, but has anyone achieved this to any degree and can anyone give me advice? What's the best distro for *this purpose*? Or am I better off building my box from the ground up, to the point of compiling *everything* from source? I would like to use this as a learning experience to gain greater knowledge of Linux and how it works."

Comments

I hit that wall too.

[Zaffle]

I hit the same sort of wall.

First thing I did was use Debian, imho it has a better packaging system. But I don't think that will solve your problems.
Though debian does come with a resonable base system (~50megs I think). And if you setup your partitions right, you can install your base system, then mount /usr readonly, but have /usr/local read-write. So the base system can't be touched (excluding confs in /etc), but you can still add new apps yourself.

However, I don't do that, I just use debian, and when I want to compile something from source, I usually create a /usr/local/ for it, and compile destined for there:
eg: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/kde2

I also do it totally non root, so that there is no chance of me writting over anything else.

The problem comes if you want to install a package that depends on something you compilied yourself. The packaging system doesn't know you have it. When that comes along, I usually just compile the desired program from source, and it finds the libs it needs.

In the end, if you want to use package management, you really need to use it all of the time, or hassels will develop.

One point though. "Alien" is really handy. Its an app that converts between binary tarballs, rpms, and debs. I use it to convert RPMs to Debs all the time. It seems to work okay.

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