I'm posting this to share with anyone who might really like the gentoo base install setup, but does not like the compile time. I'm not sure if this is important enough to submit in the howto's, so I'll just start it as a thread and see where it leads. Thanks to 320mb for the link and to Gnashley for the document.
A Brief History
I first started with linux just over two years ago, when I bought SuSe 7.3 from Best Buy. I had an extra computer and wanted to see what this linux thing was about. Once thing led to another, and I switched to slackware. Me with my newbie self couldn't keep up with compiling programs from source and removing them and all of that. I wanted/needed package management. So I switched to Mandrake 9.something. After experiencing a couple weeks of rpms, I decided to go with gentoo. I've been solid on gentoo for over a year now, but am growing weary of ebuild time (it would be different if I had an AMD64 but if wishes were horses...). I've begun looking at different well-supported options. I tried arch linux, but it screwed up my grub on my main machine, and I couldn't get the network to set up properly. So I thought I would give slackware another shot--especially with the package to
SWareT.
Purpose
Because I spent time working with gentoo, and did several gentoo installations, I came to really like the base install--what you need to run a system with nothing else.
The Problem
If I installed just the /a folder from the slackware cd, there were no development tools, network tools, and things were all around...not set up for workability. If I installed the entire /n folder, I'd get all sorts of server and mail stuff that I don't want. I want a base system with network ready to go so I cant get what I want installed, and nothing else.
The Solution
I posted a question about anyone having information on the minimum necessary packages. 320mb posted
this link written by Gnashley. I have taken their advice, modified it just a tad, and posted the results here for anyone else that's interested. [Note: This is taken from gnashley's list, with some of my suggestions. If you want the orginial list, visit Gnashley's site.]
The packages
/a
aaa_base, bash, bin, bzip2, cpio, cxxlibs, devs, devfsd, elflibs, elvis, etc, fileutils, findutils, floppy, gawk, glibc-solibs, grep, gzip, kbd, kernel-modules, less, lilo, modutils, openssl-solibs, pkgtools, procps, reiserfsprogs, sh-utils, shadow, slocate, sysklogd, sysvinit, tar, textutils, umsdosprogs, util-linux
(There are some more packages that seem to be required by the installation--I left those as is.)
/ap
bc, man, man-pages, sudo
/d
I installed everything in this folder so that I would have minimal problems installnig packages.
/l
gdk-pixbuf, glib-1.2.1, gtk+-1.2.1, lesstif, libpng, libungif, libxml2, zlib
/n
dhcpd, inetd, links, pidentd, ppp, tcpip, wget
Other packages:
Nano, Swaret
I installed nano because, while trying to learn vi, I need something simple and user friendly. I used swaret to install and take care of dependencies for x and kde, as well as to upgrade the system to current.
If anyone has any suggestion or ideas, please let me know. If I don't hear anything, then I guess I'll know I'm a freak of nature and have at least written it down for reference in the future.