My Dream OS...Advice?
 

Okay, I have my laptop set up so I have one partition with Windows on it (Shush, it's for recording :/ That's it.) and one with Ubuntu on it.

Now, I love Ubuntu and I love how I have it set up, but I wanna try something else and not accidentally everything else on my hard drive, and I'm pretty sure I can manage resizing my partitions all by myself.

So I want to add a third OS to the list. Here we go:

Features:
---------------------------------------
* 6 virtual terminals
* Primarily a command line
* GNOME (for the off chance I might need it)

That's all.

I want to make it so I can have mp3blaster running in one terminal, elinks in anothter, finch in another, one terminal for programming and the last for whatever I need at the moment.

I like apt-get (hence the name) and I'd like to be able to keep using it, but if I can't it's fine.

Also, I'd like to make the wireless to get working easily >:( It always takes me weeks to figure that out.


SO any suggestions on a distro I could configure to behave like this?

Sounds like Debian to me! :D

Of course, most any distro can be setup that way. You just have to edit the inittab file for runlevel and number of virtual terminals (though I would recommend using screen instead of separate VT's with their own logins).

Alright! I actually thought to myself "Someone's gonna bring up Debian" right after I posted it ;)

I might give it a try, but I might want something a little smaller. It's not gonna be using too much space. I do have a question though, if I wanted to let it read the files in my Ubuntu partition, how could I let it do that?

Do a netinstall of Debian then add just what you need, you'll have about as minimalistic as you can get for what you want installed.

And you could install wicd-curses to have EXTREMELY easy command line management of networking.

I like wicd-curses! That looks really cool.

When I set up debian, how would I make sure it recognizes my wireless card and such? It's all internal, should it work out of the box?

Sounds like you are looking for Debian. Of course you could always go the Slackware route and install slapt-get on it.

I'd like slack if I could get it to work haha...I can't get adduser to work for me, nor can I get virtual terminals :?

As far as debian goes, I should install i386, right? I can use 64 bit...just making sure I have my terms right lol.

For installing 32 or 64 bit, it depends on your usage of the system, just do a forum search, there are many threads out there regarding this topic.

Regarding your wireless, it depends on your hardware if it will run out of the box. A good source for how to get wireless working in Debian (and for all other kinds of information) is the Debian Wiki.

By the way, if you want it more comfortable you may also have a look at tiling windows managers like awesome wm, i3, xmonad, dwm, ...

I figured out which one I needed to download :)

Also, the wireless card here is a Broadcom STA something or other. Trying to remember from when I had that live cd up a couple of minutes ago...hopefully it's all good

And I'm probably not going to use a window manager haha

Your choice.

Regarding Broadcom wireless, anything from Broadcom is the ugliest thing under the sun, especially in Debian.

I know :P Hopefully it'll work out of the box...if it doesn't I'm gonna cry.

It will not, you need to install the firmware, and because Broadcoms ugly licence it is not delivered with Debian (I think it is not delivered out of the box with any distro, but may be I am wrong here).

Also have a look at the screen command. With this you can run many apps in just ome terminal. I believe all the apps you mentioned can be run on a single console with this command.
Hope this helps.

to get virtual terminals on slackware in run levle 4 you need to edit this part of/etc/inittab

so that all the lines look like this
c?:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty? linux
replacing the questions marks with the numbers 1 through 5

what problems are you having with adduser ?

There's a thread in the Slackware forum.

Now that I'm in Debian I can't figure out how the hell to get wireless to work :/