Greetings, fellow humans
Preface:
I must really say that I've been enjoying Linux, excluding some frustration here and there. I am looking for a Distro that would offer more of an opportunity for building and configuration. My goal is to begin to lean more of the inner workings of Linux.
My background:
I started with Ubuntu & custom partitioning, no guru stuff here. Then I began to quadruple boot with Debian Suse & windows. I played with a few miniature distros too. The distributions of Ubuntu & Suse offer an abundance of user friendly features, and a veritable library of information. The quality of Ubuntu's documentation is often times on par with the documentation associated with the larger windows software vendors; step-by-step, leaving no stone unturned, which makes it supremely superior to documentation found anywhere else in the Linux world. The documentation of other Linux Distros, unfortunately, seems to be: written for by gurus for gurus; written by people who are writing from memory or the documentation is incomplete or outdated.

What I'd like help finding:
I am looking for a Distro that offers three things:
1)Less of a challenge than what I've read of Free-BSD or Gentoo,
2) more of a challenge with less automation than Suse or Ubuntu.
3)Documentation on par with Ubuntu or at least Suse

Does anyone know of such a distro?

I loathe incomplete documentation. Has anyone ever used a purchased Distro? Please do not recommend Xandros to me. What of paid support? Any preferences for or against? Any recommended books?


Please do not recommend any distributions that use LILO as the default bootloader at installation time. In example, Slackware based distributions. LILO so limited & inflexible...ugh
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No, I've yet to write my own scripts. Should I give up?
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Thanks in advance

I think slackware may fit the bill here, but you say you don't like lilo.
That could be the first thing that you learn: how to switch to grub :-)

Another option might be Debian, but I don't really know what Ubuntu or Suse documentation is like,
so I don't know if it will fit your third condition above.

Evo2.

Arch

Arch [2].

I second the vote for Slackware.

Regards,

Alunduil

Guys just a suggestion but please read the OP's post full before replying. I'm not being rude or anything, but suggesting something which the OP clearly doesn't want is bad support imho.
Btw, i'd also like to point out to the OP that you can install GRUb in slackware from /extra. Just choose not to install lilo.

Regards

Try Centos without the GUI and this doc http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ion/index.html.
More accurately, you can install with the GUI so you can read (firefox) that doc, but do all the work from the cmd line.
In fact, you can do that with any distro if you want...

Based on your list of "I am looking for"'s,... you already know what you want.
Give it a whirl and don't come back looking to ignite fires 'please'.

Ubuntu documentation (man pages apart) is mostly about how to use the GUIs and says very little about files used, process architecture etc. Gnome's documentation takes this model to an extreme and contains almost nothing that an experienced GUI user wouldn't already know from browsing the GUI. It's an ubuntu cultural thing -- the online community's self-help is mostly HOWTO, with lots of pretty screen shots -- a "paint by numbers" approach with very little about "why" or how to dig under the hood to analyse problems.

Wow -- on re-reading that sounds very negative. I guess my 12-month brush with ubuntu left some painful frustration.

Just to point out, Free BSD isn't a Linux

Debian might be worth it as it comes with a good documentation. But it fails some how cause it's quite automatic using the apt family.
But it's sure worth the try.

Not to be rude but I'll thirt the mentioning of slackware. With all that was said above

Lilo inflexible? It's a bootloader, it does its job, what else do you want it to do?

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You referred to me as an OP. What is an OP? That's it! Pistol duel at high no0n mano a mano
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I did not think that it was possible to select grub for a Slackware bootloader at the time of Slackware's installation. Are you suggesting that at the time of Slackware's installation, it is possible to somehow get into a terminal; list files in /etc and then install grub?

Make that the second. I'd settle for getting Slackware to boot, which is a problem I've never had with any OS, windows Linux or BSD

If memory serves me correctly, Ubuntu is simply a refined Debian branch of Linux. In my experience, Debian is simply unrefined Ubuntu, fewer default options, but otherwise, they're the same, in my opinion.

Really?? Oh, clearly, you've not read my other post, which details the frustrations of simply trying to make LILO install and then boot slackware13 on sdb, which is a USB drive. This is a frustration that I never experienced with the ever so user-friendly, stalwart & venerable Grub and a multitude of other distributions. Grub would boot a boot. Death to LILO!