confessions of a Distro-Hopper
 

Having extolled the virtues of the Debian/Ubuntu family for some time, I'm having some twinges of guilt.

For some as yet unknown reason, I lost the ability to print in my Mepis 6.5 install. With pressure from my spouse**, the lazy way out was to switch over to the already installed PCLinuxOS 2007. I had evaluated this distro briefly and, upon setting it up for real, the positive first impression was re-inforced. There's a reason they are nipping at the heels of Ubuntu on the Distrowatch "hit list". It is a very well-done package.

**"Don't bother me with all your little problems--I have to print this document NOW!" .....(Anyone know this person?...;)..)

I'm feeling the first inklings of the urge to distro-hop again coming on. I'm single, so I can't blame the wife. I keep finding myself reading the install instructions on the Arch and Gentoo websites. Usually a session with the Emacs psychotherapist helps.

I LOVE Arch---I haven't worked with it for a while, and I just noticed the newest release. To me, Arch is an ideal learning tool. I basically set it aside in a period where I had to do some "real work".

I haven't done much distro hopping; Debian -> Fedora -> Gentoo -> CLFS over the past four or five years. Once I settled on CLFS as the distro for me, I started minor and micro version hopping the packages installed on my system (you know, if Foo-1.0.0.1 is good, then Foo-1.0.0.2 must be even better!!!). There's not much time to do anything else when you're doing that! I finally settled down, but usually still spend a few hours every couple of weekends building some new applications that I've just stumbled across.

BTW, pixellany, you're going to need to add F) know how to build radios with SnPb solder pretty soon.

I installed PCLinuxOS 2007 along with Mepis 6.5 on my desktop. I use PCLinuxOS 90% of the time while on line. Its pretty clean and well put together without a bunch of extras. Now I did choose Mepis for my laptop, it installed without any work while PCLinuxOS needed some adjustments that I didn't want to work with at the time. Being honest for being a live distro PCLinuxOS is a clean impressive distro and is going to get more popular.

Out of curiousity, what's the connection?---i.e. how would the live CD capability affect the quality of the installed version?
conversely, ANY distro can be released in a "live" version (and most of the biggies already have)

I was referring to the running programs. I haven't checked the memory usage or the hd physical size but PCLinux appears to be quite smaller. (default installation)

For the 'biggies', the Live CD is a variant build of the main distro, so you would guess that if the Live CD has 'issues', the main build will too.

OTOH for the specialist 'small distros', the live CD is more likely to be either their raison d'etre or a very big part of their reason for existing, so it is more likely to get direct attention rather than just being a spin-off.

For a specialist Live CD, updating and adding packages isn't such a big issue -it can be possible, but the ease of doing it isn't such an issue. So, while you would argue that for a conventional desktop/server distro, the package manager and associated tools (and avoiding dependency issues) are a big part of what makes a distro good, for a live CD those things will get less emphasis.

Practically, you'll probably just get yourself a refreshed live CD rather than updating individual packages.