[lug] Linux Distr. Size (was: no fun with the sun)

[Walter Pienciak]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ferdinand P. Schmid [mailto:fschmid at archenergy.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 9:43 AM
> To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
> Subject: [lug] Linux Distr. Size (was: no fun with the sun)
> 
> <snip>
> If Slackware is just as porky as RedHat then I may need to spend around $100
> for 32 MB of extra memory to get any use out of my Sparc Classic.
> <snip>

You want lean?  I don't know where Debian weighs in these days, but back
when they first started, you didn't even get vi in the core distribution.
You worked with ed.

I always felt that the Linux distros came in 2 basic versions:

- Build your own system
    The core distribution is very lean -- just the essentials -- and you
    make the decisions about what goes onto your system.  These appeal
    especially to those folks who don't like precompiled binaries but
    prefer to compile and install everything exactly as they want.  "A tidy
    system is a good system."  Early Slackware, Debian, and ? 

- Preassembled 
    Time is money, and disk space is cheap.  I just want to type "install",
    go away for a few hours, and come back to a full hard drive with all
    the bell, whistles, toys, and gimcracks installed.  To be fair, these
    distributions pretty much all allow you to select/deselect functional
    bundles, but the core bundle is larger and targeted for end users. 
    Was the original soup-to-nuts distro Yggdrasil?  Now, Red Hat and ?

I've done both, and my preference varies on the situation.

Caveat:  It's been a few years since I fooled much with various
distributions, and I'd be interested in hearing how these/other distros
now fit this build/preassembled model.

Walter