[sllug-members]: Preferred Linux architecture?

[Chad]

On 8/18/06, Nathan Lane [yho] <nathanderweiser at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>   I have been playing around with using Linux permanently for my personal
> computer operating system for about 2 years now.  I have "played" around
> with several distros, and I'm not to happy with parts of some and other
> parts of others.  I still have difficulty installing certain distros as
> well, which may be due to older hardware.
[SNIP]

What kind of hardware are we talking about, how much "older" is it?

I don't necessarily need all those things on every box I've installed,
but it doesn't take me more than about an hour to get everything
situated from a fresh install to a system I can use.  What I tend to
do, and actually recently had to do (a power outage murdered my
desktop, I had to dump Fedora and either re-install or go with
something else).  I installed Kubuntu and have been fairly impressed.
Initial install was good to just get me going.  From there, some
packages were not installed that I need or want, so I fired up the
adept package manager and installed them.  I'm not sure what tools you
are missing, if it's developers tools such as gcc, if you type gcc
into the bar, gcc should pop up as an option.  Install it, and adept
will pull in all it's dependencies from Ubuntu's repos and install
them.  Assuming you know the name of the tool you are looking for,
adept seems like a good choice for after-install package management.

Also, without any specifics of what went wrong with your other distro
'tests' I can only speculate.  Gentoo would be a candidate if you know
what tools you need, plus with the fine grained control you have with
source, it may prove to be a great platform for a developer; I guess
it really depends on what you are developing.  But dependencies are
taken care of, a fresh install includes a lot of developing tools, and
then for the desktop a simple command:
emerge gnome
And a movie break :D

So...  A direct answer to your question, yeah I think most of the
distros install everything I want fresh out of the box; a usable
environment.  After that it's all customized/tailored to me through
package management.

-Chad