The Linux thread

I've run the gamut with Linux distros. Like many, I cut my teeth on Red Hat. That...was fucking painful. It did at least give me a taste of what running the penguin was like, though.

After that I went through a number of all-in-one graphical distros. Mandrake, SuSE, XandrOS, JAMD, etc. All of them had some shortcoming or another that precluded my being able to comfortably use them. Also note that these installs were all being done on an eMachines M6805 laptop with an AMD64 chip which was, at the time, relatively new in the consumer arena. Add to that the fact that it had a lot of new/weird/proprietary hardware, an ATI graphics card (Y HELO THAR shitty driver support) and a WXGA screen (Y HELO THAR nonstandard resolutions) and getting Linux working was something of a bitch.

Then I tried Gentoo.

Stage 1.

With shit in the way of prior experience.

You can imagine how well that one worked.

I've finally stabilized on a day-to-day use configuration of Ubuntu Edgy, and a server/tinkerer configuration of Slackware 10.2. I find Ubuntu does a very good job of abstracting the lower-level activities of the system such that I'm able to focus on work and not on actually making the system work. When I want to get to those inner workings, Slackware is really good at staying out of my way and not throwing me curveballs where I don't expect them. i.e. most of the guides on doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou dot somelinuxwalkthroughcrap dot com actually apply accurately to the way Slackware does its thing.

I'd like to try a Stage 1 Gentoo build or an LFS install again at some point. Just not right now, too many other projects going on.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I'll assume that SLED is SuSE Linux Enterprise Distribution or something to that effect. That said, have they trimmed down the bloat at all? I remember looking at ISOs for SuSE...8 or 9, I think, on my school's software FTP and seeing something like 2-3 DVD-R images for it. It seemed really excessive at the time, about 3 years ago.

I've never been fond of distros I can't fit on a single CD-R (or two if I want source packages etc.). If I want more stuff I can always download it via aptitude/portage/$ONLINE_DISTRIBUTION_SYSTEM. I guess for those without broadband or living in areas where it isn't available (spoiled Chicagoan here) having everything pre-burned would be nice, but I fancy a quick install and a bit of patchwork here and there later on.

Nevermind the fact that I'm working on batch-scripting all of my apps into my WinXP install media and will likely wind up burning it to a DVD as it'll far exceed 700MB. Whatever. Principle or something. Shut up.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Using ANYTHING other than WinME will make your computer more reliable.

The wireless device most likely will work fine.

MSN I can pretty much guarantee you will NOT work. It ain't called MICROSOFT messenger for no reason, you know. Not sure about Yahoo. So what you do is you install Gaim and use it to connect to your MSN and Yahoo accounts, and you're back in business.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.