[linux-audio-user] Distros these days? What a mess!

[Stephen Hassard]

iainduncan at telus.net wrote:
> Does it use a BSD style port system? I really liked gentoos emerge, but they've
> gone and screwed up the underlying foundation in order to have a gui installer.

Check out the AUR guidelines:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/New_AUR_user_guidelines

That's about as close as it gets to the bsd ports tree.

> How does Arch compare with somthing like slackware?

It feels very similar.

Installation is similar (test based installed from CD or ftp, about the 
same level of complication).

Their are no distro specific GUI configuration tools (a good thing in my 
book).

Startup is very minimalist (it doesn't start every daemon in the world 
on startup) so it starts fast and doesn't eat all of your RAM.

I tend to like to install only the base system, configure 'pacman' 
(arch's version of apt) to use all of the bleeding edge repositories, 
then do something along the lines of the following:

#update the base system
pacman -Syu

#add xorg and kde, don't forget to add your gfx driver (xf86-video-foo)
pacman -S xorg kde

#configure xorg
xorgcfg

Then you're more or less ready to go. I've found that it's a fairly 
painless install.

later,
Steve