On Friday 12 April 2002 07:17, you wrote:

Keith Watson wrote:

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Just a quick hello from someone who's just joined.

Welcome to ALUG, Keith...

[SNIP]

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Reason for joining: After many years of saying "This year I'm going to install an Intel version of Unix on my PC" I finally got round to putting Mandrake 7.0 on early last year. I immediately started to try and customise it to suit my hardware and ran into all sorts of problems. I'm now in the midst of trying to install my own flavour of Linux from the Linux From Scratch project http://www.linuxfromscratch.org and having moderate success. I hope to learn enough from this to have a bit more success tailoring Linux for my own use. It would be nice to link up with other Linux afficianados in the area and swap war stories, experiences etc. and perhaps be able to help others out where possible.

Although I understand that Mandrake is the easiect to install, I doubt it will suit someone with real knowledge, with results you've seen. I've found that, as my knowledge has increased, I have become more and more frustrated with packaged Linux systems. My personal favourite, and which remains so for the desktop, is SuSE. I'm quite happy to allow them to cosset me in the land of sound, X, and such stuff. However, servers are another matter entirely.

[SNIP]

I run Mandrake on my machine. I let it set up all my X server, gadgets, games etc. and installed all the server stuff from source. Since I sometimes play about with stuff at home for work I find that Mandrake's default installation locations are pants, not to mention the fact that it installs Apache with *everything* turned on. In fact I hardly ever install from packages. I don't find that Mandrake complains at all. If I need to install something from the CDs then I use the source RPM and build it from there. That way I don't have to worry about missing dependencies etc. All in all, a great distro - and this comes from a "hardcore" Unix user who plays with Solaris at work.

Matt