Debian is hands-down the best distro I have ever, ever used. Its package management system is top-notch, and is backed by the most assiduous and careful package maintainers you will ever meet. It''s never let me down.

"Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke

LFS is clearly the winner if you want light and customized.

quote: Original post by Oluseyi

quote: Original post by aftermath
You just cant say `no'' to Gentoo

No.

What do you mean?

I mean that not only can I say no to Gentoo, but that (if you''d look through that thread) I am willing to present my reasons.

I won''t rant here about how much I like Gentoo, but if minimal-time-to-working-system is the objective, I think RedHat or SuSe are good choices.

All of the main-stream, big-name distro''s upgrade easy. That''s how they got to be main-stream. With Linux you have multiple kernels installed simutaneously and pick which one to boot from the lilo or grub menu.


Vlion, kernel panics on boot from Gentoo are often caused by bad kernel options and fstab files - things that are correctable without re-compiling the kernel. The other common problem is not compiling your root filesystem into the kernel. You can look from me on #gentoo under the names MagmaiKH and sbarber if you decide to give it a second shot. I could even build you a kernel, package it, and email it to you It''d a good test for the compiler farm I''m setting up. Compiling the kernel is weak point in Gentoo right now. They are working on genkernel though. I definetly recommend you emerge the latest genkernel prior to compiling a kernel.

in spite of it''s curses based installer slackware is also a quick and easy install and nearly everything works out of the box..

Gentoo seems great- like, really great.
But it seems to have alot of overhead for installation.
It appears to be very stable- once running.
I don''t particularly care to have no TV card or sound(onboard and tends to be not found by linux)and spend weeks trying to get them working.
If I had a generic box, with no Windows overwriting to consider, I would use gentoo. But this is a system that "running now, updating every night" is the primary concern. Also it will take ages to compile. KDE took 7 hours to compile via their handy auto-download/compile tool(very nice btw)- what will happen if I build an entire GUI from scratch?
I need to start working on a project(in a GUI)this weekend- I can''t afford the downtime that a full compile will force me into. My secondary computer is console only. If I can get the Gentoo install-from-CD cds working(they wanted to do the std gentoo install last time), I''ll probably go with them.

Any Linux is pretty much fine by me: I just want minimum time installation and minimum update problems. Speed is really nice too, but not as important.

Slackware is really nice if you want a clean, fast, no-nonsense distro. The good point is that everything just works: no bells and whistles, pure power. The package system is indeed not as useful as that of other, more progressive distros but it does the job: Installing the system is a breeze. Adding software that''s not part of the system is as simple as running ./configure; make; checkinstall (note checkinstall: that way a slackware package will be created and installed so you can uninstall it afterwards. VERY useful!) You keep track of all dependencies but that usually means installing one or two extra packages/libraries. That way you have full control over your system. No automatic dependencies = no pollution with useless stuff.
Another good point is that all sources just compile, slackware follows the standards and doesn''t take "RedHatish" or other shortcuts, has vanilla kernel sources, standard file locations.
I''d compare slack to an already precompiled LFS: full control for people that don''t have the time to build the base system by hand but do like to fiddle with it and set everything up by hand.
Btw, slackware 9.1 is fully 2.6.x compatible: just download the newest vanilla sources and off you go!
But, slackware is indeed not for people that don''t like the commandline and manually aditing the config files. Anyway, it''s my distro of choice.

Oluseyi: As strongly as you feel against Gentoo, I honestly don''t think you can recommend against it without first trying it. Of course you can''t vouch for it either...but it''s simply not fair to attack something you haven''t tried, no matter how logically you go about it.

Vlion: Since you already said you don''t want to spend time with something like Gentoo, I''d suggest either Slackware or SuSE.