[Sheflug] Distro Recommendation

["Netsonic" <netsonic [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I thought I would ask for your advice/recommendations for the best distro we
can use here.

The situation is that a friend of mine has a quite new laptop (6 months or
so old). Having seen my laptop with Gentoo installed on it he wants to give
Linux a go; unfortunately, being a bit of a perfectionist, he wants to start
from the ground up with an absolute minimum install, and then compile as
much as possible from source. (Actually thats not unfortunate, depending on
which way you look at it!).

Well anyway, what I've suggested is after the minimal install, from
whichever distro he decides upon, to then go for the various drivers, then
kernel tweaking & recompiling, then XFree, then Kde, then Gnome and after
that, start looking at application type stuff.

But to be honest we're at a bit of a loss as to which distro to use. I've
already suggested Gentoo as it is highly configurable/tweakable etc, but he
doesn't like it, and in particular doesn't like the emerge package system.

So, could anybody give me any recommendations here ?

What we basically want is a system that can be built from compilation as
well as precompiled binaries; where compiling from source won't interfere
too much with any package management system. Obviously it will need some
kind of package management, otherwise trying to sort out all the
dependencies is going to be a major headache!

I'm wondering if there is something out there that is *similar* to Gentoo
but maybe with a different package management setup.

I've heard that the deb based systems are good at managing packages, but
never really tried them myself yet.

The ones we have access to right now are:

Mandrake 9.2
Suse 9
Gentoo
Libranet 2.8.1 (I bought this for myself but never used it as I went for
Gentoo in the end)

I also have a broadband connection here, so downloading something else
wouldn't be a problem.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or recommendations you may have.

Steve.

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