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Some questions about linux setup

You can mount certain filesystems read-only, or use chattr to prevent writing to files. Graphical booting is easy, usually just a matter of changing the default runlevel in /etc/inittab. I think with Ubuntu every runlevel is graphical anyway. Might wanna try xfce for the desktop environment. Geany is a good graphical code editor. Nvidia makes linux drivers. I don't know which distro you were using before, but what I'm hearing from a lot of people is that Ubuntu is very easy to set up. I prefer Slack of course...but whatever you choose, that stuff shouldn't be a problem.

The "best" is whatever you consider "best", really. I'm not familiar with upsplash, but what exactly is it lacking? If you want to speed things up, compile a custom kernel, minimize start-up services, use the right filesystem for the job, minimize use of swap space, make sure the harddrives are using the right DMA settings, make sure your partitions aren't getting too full. From what I understand RedHat is incredibly bloated, probably why it was slow. Linux doesn't sort itself out, that job is up to you.

As far as gcc and libs, it's just up to the developer. It's usually safer to not go bleeding-edge, else you'll have trouble compiling things, but you don't want to get outdated either. For example, Slack now uses gcc 4.3, but newest stable is 4.4 and 4.5 is usable and in development.

Well of course RPMs and DEB packages contain info about dependencies. To find dependencies of dependencies, you could probably write a simple shell or python script that uses the output of rpm or dpkg.

If you have a pretty fast boot time, a bootsplash is kind of useless.
You don't really have to deal with the bootloader much; once things are set up and working, just set the timeout to 0.

weird gibberish 8^)

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Originally Posted by lewc (Post 3752566)

Well as PC user I want a sodding bootsplash, I want it now and I want it to work. ...no matter how low your boot time can go I think its best to use a bootsplash to add that sheen on the product.

This http://splashy.alioth.debian.org/wiki/ might be worth looking at.

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I personally used to edit the init scripts so that linux only told me about errors

Not a bad idea. I'd maybe look into doing something like that if I rebooted often, and if it took longer than ~20 seconds to boot.
[edit]Actually, the messages go by so fast on this machine that I can't read them anyway, maybe I'll look into that...not a splash, but disabling some of the "echo <whatever>" stuff...

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since the 90's people have been hacking together ways of making Linux hide info and show a bootscreen

There's one of the problems(for me)- it's a hack that I'd rarely use, and running a superfluous program would just add time at boot.

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My partner actually refers to Linux as "that program with all the gibberish that looks weird"

Funny!