Keith Watson wrote:

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

Welcome to ALUG, Keith...

[SNIP]

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.

Soem time ago, I predicted that if SuSE (and, ergo, the others) carried on the way they were, there would need to be a split in distros between those aimed at the desktop, and those for servers. The fundamental requirements are simply too different. Servers, for instance, rarely need X or anything X-related, and the mainstream distros are concentrating more and more on killing 'doze: which means X. SuSE, with 8.0 out later this month, are doing exactly that: splitting the versions. This is A Good Thing, IMO, except, and this is the nasty part, the server distro will be 6mths behind the desktop, and will also cost over £400! EEK! I'm not prepared to take that route. I run an hosting company (MJR, expect a mail and a grovelling apology later), and have a need for lean, mean builds, with ease of maintenance, yet flexibility to add new versions and/or functionality.

My knowledge has, I think, reached the level where LFS is an option, but the overhead in getting my head round it, and then package management, is too great to be a commercial option. I looked at Debian, but I can't afford the often significant delays in new versions, which often contain critical security fixes. [No, this isn't a troll, all you Debian fans!]

I need a package that easy to install and manage, and as up-to-date as possible.

Over the last few years, I've progressed a great deal in Linux. I started with SuSE 5.3 and the current version, 7.3, truly is a dream to install, configure and run. Support is excellent, and it's possible to keep or release pretty well as much control as one wants. I've played with RH and hated it, also Mandrake, Debian, and a couple of other minor distros, but have stuck with SuSE. SuSE V8.0, out later this month, promises to be the dog's. But...

There are things that frustrate the hell out of me in having so much done for me. This is particularly an issue with respect to small installations with specific purposes such as mail-server, firewall, web server, db engine and so on. I've come to believe, after running a hosting company for over two years, that small, specific boxes are better than a big mother doing everything. Small, in this context, BTW, is relative, an athlon 1700+XP isn't small as such... Anyway...

What did it for me was the conceptually excellent Yast Online Update on SuSE 7.3. To explain, it's an manually-initiated auto package updater (yes, not always a good idea) used principally for applying security fixes to specific packages, and ensuring dependencies are fixed. The grief zlib caused recently is a good example of why one would want such a thing... I'd built an AMD K6-2/550 firewall box for a customer, which was running fine (still is actually), but ran YOU on it in auto mode. Because some package or other "required" sendmail (as in, there was a possibility it might use it) YOU installed it. Having spent some time hand-picking what I wanted and what I didn't, this irritated, especially as one of the things I'd installed was the excellent SSMTP which is a tiny daemon that hands over SMTP traffic to a "real" SMTP server, fulfilling the requirement without the weight (and potential hole) of sendmail. The final straws were when SuSE broke CLI YOU in 7.3, ironically via a YOU update, and then announced that YAST1, the CLI tool, would not appear in V8.

I realised that there were more and more circumstances where I wanted to control, exactly, what I put on the system. I also wanted compiled, optimised everything, not the RPM builder's idea of what options I wanted. PHP, for instance, is a good example of the problems in that approach.

I looked at Debian, and I know there are a lot of supporters in here for it, but it's too far behind the curve for me. I want to be more up-to-date, and sometimes I need, for commercial reasons, new functionality immediately. Debian can be several months behind.

Then I found Gentoo... http://www.gentoo.org

Not perfect, it requires quite a lot of investment in learning how it works. Broadband helps a great deal, as does patience. Everything, from compilers to libraries is compiled first, then the kernel, and then every single package you want to install. All optimised for your system, according to a) an editable make.conf, and b) one's own kernel options.

Everything is downloaded as required from a server (one can take a local copy, currently 2GB) and install any of 1600 packages, all prestructured, dependencies dealt with. I'm still testing before we put a server live, but so far, a few glitches and quirks along the way, I remain impressed and optimistic. I've put it on an old AMD K6-2/550 with 256MB and a 2.5GB HDD, and am setting it up as a web-server with apache/php/mysql (quiet in the cheap seats!). So far, I am blown away with the speed this thing runs at...

If you're looking at LFS, you could do much, much worse than look at Gentoo...

Cheers, Laurie.