[Techtalk] customized installation

[Julie Bovee Hill]

On 4/18/06, Carla Schroder wrote:
> Anyone have thoughts on which Linux lends itself the best to xTreme
> customization?
<snip>
> All that stuff is pretty straightforward. I thought to add an extra touch of
> coolness, and to also make my life a little easier, I would start with an
> extremely customized Linux installation. Just the essentials with no fluff.
> Sooo...I hereby solicit opinions.

Gentoo comes to mind. From the Gentoo main page at www.gentoo.org:
"We produce Gentoo Linux, a special flavor of Linux that can be
automatically optimized and customized for just about any application
or need. Extreme performance, configurability and a top-notch user and
developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience."

When you undertake a Gentoo install, there's no fluff, you end up with
exactly what you emerge. I remember being shocked the first time I
installed it to realize that I didn't even have vim until I emerged it
:-) But the downside, of course, is that a Gentoo install is not for
the faint of heart. What I love most about it is that I learned far
more about Linux in just 2 days from a weekend spent installing Gentoo
than I had learned over several years of installing/running Redhat and
Debian.

> Then there are specialized tiny Linuxes like Puppy. But this series is also
> intended as general Linux introduction, so whatever the reader learns can be
> easily transferable.
>
> soooo.... ?

Your readers would definitely have learned something by the time they
finished installing Gentoo. Also, Gentoo is pretty generic, so much of
what is learned is transferrable.

Have a look at the marvelous Gentoo documentation:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml

Julie
A shameless Gentoo devotee :-)