Oneiric and LinuxMint KDE 12

[rms]

Which is brilliant if you don't care about tinkering with your system much and it's more likely to just work (tm).

I second that, Kubuntu is indeed a smooth ride out of the box. :cool:

[bsniadajewski]

Or archlinux its like Gentoo with out all that damned compiling

I may try Arch or even one of the Slackware derivatives (but probably not Slackware itself, maybe slackel or so) one of these days just for the heck of it, but I'll stick with the minimal CL install and build from there.

@james147 Using the minimal command-line install CD(available here) will work like you describe with Archlinux.

[rms]

I may try Arch or even one of the Slackware derivatives (but probably not Slackware itself, maybe slackel or so) one of these days just for the heck of it, but I'll stick with the minimal CL install and build from there.

Spare yourself the trouble unless you have a really good reason to do it. Otherwise, by the time you setup Arch to your liking you'll probably forget why you did it in the first place, and forget 15/16 of what you've read during the process. And it will probably resemble Kubuntu in the end.

[SteveRiley]

by the time you setup Arch to your liking you'll probably forget why you did it in the first place, and forget 15/16 of what you've read during the process

Been there, done that, never again!

[bsniadajewski]

@rms

Hmm... Something to think about..

[GreyGeek]

Been there, done that, never again!

Ditto!

When I was a younger buck I used to relish in compiling kernels and Ethernet drivers, etc. As recently as 10 years ago I wrote my own Linux shell to control what the user logged into for a BBS that I wrote at work. I even played around with Gentoo and LinuxFromScratch!

Back then inittab was the pivotal startup file in a Linux distro. When a new account was created the files in /etc/skel/ were used as a template to create the home account directory's ~/.profile file, which contained bash commands to be executed. For a console based system that script could be a turnkey gateway controlling access and activities permitted in an account.

Inittab was easy to code and hence the start up of Linux was easy to control. So was LILO and the early version of grub which allowed one to manually edit menu.lst to control the boot process. In addition, one could create their own xorg.conf file based on a UI app that queried a database file of video drivers and displays. One was in full control of their system, IF their hardware was compatible with the drivers that were available.

Most of today's distros have Upstart and other schemes to automatically configure the hardware without user intervention. For most hardware the results are excellent, as they are for my new Acer 7739 notebook. One generally doesn't have to be concerned with hardware configuration. Things "just work".

Today, I'm thankful for that... (pardon me while I adjust my bib to catch my drool...) Everything below the DE and the apps are things I no longer take any notice of, unless they give me problems, which is rarely. I appreciate the power of KDE in creating an environment for doing what it is that I want to do, the way I want to do it, which involves using apps like SAGE, Stellarium, PostgreSQL, KMail, Chromium, Skype, Audacity, K3B, VLC, Blink, LibreOffice, etc...

and Minecraft!

[SteveRiley]

(pardon me while I adjust my bib to catch my drool...)

sudo apt-get purge drool-bib && sudo apt-get install drool-bib-extra-large

[GreyGeek]

Ah, there's an app for that!