John R. Culleton wrote: <snip />
I am not quite ready to do Linux from scratch.
Why not? It's not hard, it just takes a bit of time... Once you grok what's going on - get jhalfs, a bash script that builds makefiles from "the book" and builds a flawless LFS without intervention :-)
BLFS is a different beast altogether however and we are having discussions on the lists (really more to do with the LiveCD) about some sort of Package Management implementation that would make LFS/BLFS into a distro where the dependencies tree can be updated and managed...
When you build a working LFS/BLFS it is a *REAL* eye opener. The performance. boot time, lack of cruft will make you drooooool ;-)
But I do want to
install a distro on a spare partition that is friendly toward graphics packages like Inkscape, Scribus and Gimp. Slackware makes me jump through too many hoops. I tried Gentoo once years ago but it seemed to take forever just to get a normal install. I am also looking at Debian. Ubuntu is a bit simplistic for my needs. I need a bit more control.
I am using Ubunutu currently as my work desktop machine (LFS/BLFS for servers) and if you have been through LFS you can get as much control as you want - even with apt. [Roll on PM for LFS!]
Al LFS ID #216 http://www.theopensourcerer.com