Distro Recommendation Needed

GhostlyPea · 17 Jul 2008 at 13:30

Hi guys,

Looking at gettign an Acer One and using a different distro on it. The problem is that I can't find one that is a very lightweight GUI edition but without bundled stuff like word processors, media players etc. All I want is basically the shell and then the ability to add in everything else after. So far I've seen slax, DSL and xUbuntu but they still all seem to come with stuff (althogh slax and xubuntu are looking good). Any recommendations on the least cluttered distro? Preferably something reasonably easy to add apps too aswell

Cheers

- Pea0n

craptakular · 17 Jul 2008 at 13:36

Arch linux or gentoo?

Ethics · 17 Jul 2008 at 13:38

Arch linux would get my vote. Install the base and then add xserver etc as you see fit

Distro doesnt really matter in terms of a GUI because you can use any DE/WM you want.

GhostlyPea · 17 Jul 2008 at 13:41

Ive never added or removed any GUIs or changed them in Linux so I'm not really sure how you mean by DE/WM, got a link?

Cheers for Gentoo and Arch, saw that around and I'll give them a closer look

Keep them coming, I'll probably try a few out

- Pea0n

pingwing · 17 Jul 2008 at 13:43

Gentoo or arch (but it will take some time to set it up propperly and get it light weight). EDIT: way slow a typing

That said if you follow a few guides of how to do gentoo propperly its really easy to get a very fast system on a low spec machine (i had a really good setup on an old p2 machine using xfce4 for my desktop) and emerge is one of the best tools for adding and removing programmes to

GhostlyPea · 17 Jul 2008 at 13:49

Well i just had a look over a few guides for installing Arch with a USB stick, unfortunatly it seems to show how to set the USB stick up form linux rather than from XP so I'm lost on how to do that. Gentoo looks interesting but I get a feeling arch would be very very good for my needs if i got it working.

-Pea0n

Ethics · 17 Jul 2008 at 13:57

For installing arch on USB the wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_USB_stick) includes a link to special USB image files.

So you take the image file, open/extract (with magic iso or something) it copy all the files to your USB stick and set the laptop to boot from USB .

Which is effectively what the dd command is doing,, copying the iso bit by bit

Dj_Jestar · 17 Jul 2008 at 14:06

Pea0n said:
Well i just had a look over a few guides for installing Arch with a USB stick, unfortunatly it seems to show how to set the USB stick up form linux rather than from XP so I'm lost on how to do that. Gentoo looks interesting but I get a feeling arch would be very very good for my needs if i got it working.

-Pea0n

You'll boot from the USB stick, instead of within XP. So technically, it doesn't matter that the instructions are not XP related. All you need to do is copy the contents of the iso to the stick.

GhostlyPea · 17 Jul 2008 at 15:12

Cheers for the link Ethics,

Jestar - Realised that with the link. The console commands it was using were confusing me as I had no idea what it was doing, but if it only has to be extracted to a USB stick then thats defo easy enough

I'll download both tonight and have a play in VirtualBox to see whats hot and not. Just need to wait until pay-day before I can grab my One now

- Pea0n

Outcast · 17 Jul 2008 at 15:42

THIS THREAD may be of some assistance to you.. Scroll down and someones explained how to do it in XP as well.

GhostlyPea · 17 Jul 2008 at 16:35

Cheers Outcast, considering the Acer One doesn't have a CD-Drive thats pretty handy

- Pea0n

ToastedCheese · 19 Jul 2008 at 16:49

Not been in this forum for some time - or even Overclockers for that matter. it's strange how over time distros become in/out of favour.

From my experience for home desktop usage it has to be Ubuntu. I've just installed version and 8.04 and I'm frankly astonished at how good it is. In terms of looks, ease of use and installation.

Historically, I've used Fedora and SuSE - they always seemed bloated and slow.