actualy its partly about version 9.0, I''m using 8.1 right now because I''m not about to upgrade to 9.0 because of everything I''ve heard about it (it''ll be worse in my opinion than 8.1). 8.1 is still using gnome 1.4 so the first thing I do is download the dropeling installer then spend the next hour downloading & installing all the gnome packages (thanks to dropeline easy yes, but long), then I download openoffice install that, then I install ajunta, then I install.... I think you see where this is going. then I hafta install the nvidia drivers (which with my latest upgrade I can''t get to work for nothing... but I don''t think this is slackwares fault), then its on to the mouse wheel...

what I''m looking for is one of the multi-cd distros I guess, I''d like for atleast most of the software I use to be somewhere on the cd & that software be uptodate. also some of this distros that can pickup hardware on its own would be nice so I don''t have to configure it by hand (like the mouse wheel, digital cam, usb joysticks, use the nvidia drive instead of the built in?)

I know it sounds odd because I more or less want to go the oposite way of most. I''ve been in the world of configure everything by hand for a long time, and I want to go to the world of let the OS handle it. what I''d like is a distro that can handle this type of stuff on its own, but still let me get under the hood & play with it when I need/want to.

SuSE sounds like that, but I don''t like the idea of a distro mixing closed & open source I think that is something that should be left upto the end-user.


Gentoo, yes I''ve played with this before, the problem I''ve had is that I can''t get usb to work properly. turn on usb support kernel hanges just after check for usb devices. turn it off it boots fine. but I''d realy like to use my usb devices (mostly my mouse & keyboard).

I''ve been thinking about installing gentoo get everything downloaded, installed, & configured then image the drive using dd or something but shit... a 20GB image? ture I could break it down into several partitions (root/usr & home) then just image the one partition then write an install script to setup the home partition the way I want. I did this not to long ago with a slackware server that I''m selling as a cheap alternative to a windows server for small business, but I don''t know if I want to go this route with my machines.

make sure that when you install gentoo, that you compile usb HID support into the kernel, with the USB support, that way you can have it actually work for the HID standard USB devices. For everything else, just make sure your compile flags aren''t too aggressive, and you will be fine, Mine are just march=athlon-mp -mmmx -msse -m3dnow, or something like that.

yea I had hid support compiled in & that would cause it to hange. I had realy basic optimizations too... like -O2 and a few others and that was it

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Original post by Great Milenko
Gentoo, yes I''ve played with this before, the problem I''ve had is that I can''t get usb to work properly. turn on usb support kernel hanges just after check for usb devices. turn it off it boots fine. but I''d realy like to use my usb devices (mostly my mouse & keyboard).

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There are 3 different USB drivers available in the kernel.. perhaps you didn''t pick the right one? Or perhaps you need to enable devfs support, or maybe usbdevfs support too? Er... or maybe you forgot to enable the right options in Input Core Support? Or perhaps you should give vanilla-sources a try instead of gentoo-sources (which, IMHO, are occasinally over patched and unstable...)
Hehe... there are a lot of places where it can go wrong I was just throwing out some guesses... USB seems to be one of the trickyier things to fix when it''s not working.

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I''ve been thinking about installing gentoo get everything downloaded, installed, & configured then image the drive using dd or something but shit... a 20GB image? ture I could break it down into several partitions (root/usr & home) then just image the one partition then write an install script to setup the home partition the way I want. I did this not to long ago with a slackware server that I''m selling as a cheap alternative to a windows server for small business, but I don''t know if I want to go this route with my machines.

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Using tar with the right archiving options (so that it remembers permissions and such.. can''t remember what they are off the top of my head) works tons better than dd''ing your drive. DD would make an exact copy of the partition (including blank space!) whereas using tar would not only eliminate blank space but compress your files as well.

FYI, there is currently some kernel-autoconfiguration stuff being worked on by the gentoo developers, but I don''t know if it''s included in the latest live-cd or not. ... there is also an install program (Gintogi) that I am working on but a working public release could still be as much as a month or two away.