Spec me a new distro...

PermaBanned · 16 Oct 2010 at 16:00

Well my AWN 10.04 partition that i've been using recently just ran out of space, and my attempts to free some seem to have broken it... so, in that aincient Linux spirit (if it aint broke, fix it 'till it is then reinstall and start again

) i've wiped my OS drive (WD360) and i'm in my Peppermint Live CD. Long story short - i'm looking for something new to play around with, preferably not Ubuntu based as that's what pretty much all of my Linux OS's have been to date. Not really sure what to go for, i'm looking at Sabayon, Arch (which i tried last year but for the life of my couldn't get my head round installing it), Crunchbang (or Archbang) and many others but i'm a bit undecided... suggestions? Thanks

And just to add, would be best if it could fit on a 700MB CD, not much of a limitation but still...

PermaBanned · 19 Oct 2010 at 20:20

Well despite this i'm still not sure if i'm skilled (or just too lazy) enough to use something like Arch on a daily basis, i'm considering giving LMDE a go, playing around with it to get to grips.

PermaBanned · 19 Oct 2010 at 22:21

Well i guess it's worth another try, relatively small .iso size is helpful for me too, with my abysmal internet connection. Main problem i have is not being able to see the wiki when actually installing it, but i think i could find a way around that... thanks, i'll give it a go when i get some free time.

PermaBanned · 22 Oct 2010 at 15:52

JHeaton said:
Might be an idea to print out one of the beginners' guides so that you can at least get a usable desktop before tackling the tricker stuff. Failing that, text-based browsers are your friend. Links, elinks, lynx etc.

Well I've managed to install it, seems to be going well so far. I'm up to the point in the beginners guide about pacman mirrors, where it says:

Edit mirrorlist.backup and uncomment all
mirrors on the same continent or within
geographical proximity to test with
rankmirrors.

And I'm not entirely sure what it means. I assume that a comment has something to do with the hash, is it telling me to delete the hash before all but one server in each group? Thanks

PermaBanned · 22 Oct 2010 at 16:23

Well i missed the part that said it was optional so i'll skip it and come back to it later if needs must, thanks. I have to say i'm thankful for you convincing me to give this a go, it's far more fufilling than using a distro where everything is done for you. And OCUK in Links is just plain epic

PermaBanned · 24 Oct 2010 at 19:00

Well after several days (or a few hours) hard work this is where i'm at:

Lots of troubleshooting still to go, in fact i'm tempted to format and do it all again but just having a usable GUI desktop is a good enough milestone for me. That's enough for today however, thanks!

PermaBanned · 26 Oct 2010 at 21:52

Well my second attempt, from scratch, seems to have been far more successful. Using nouveau i think this might just be a keeper, even if i did make a few mistakes in the installation that might come back to haunt me.

Now i just need to decide if i want to start X on boot or not and i can start customizing it more