I’m looking for a distro with a very small (or even better none at all) set of packages bundled with the starting distro install but with a large (possibly huge) repository of packages; I would then select and install ONLY what I need.

Due to the limited number of packages I’m not considering distro such as DSL, Puppy, etc; for the same reason I have excluded (unfortunately) Slackware based distros (Nimblex would be perfect).

I’m rather focusing on stripped down distro such MCNLive and PCLinuxOS Minime (although the latter is based on a very old version of PCLinuxOS) and on distros that provide “networking install” such as Debian and Yoper.

Are you aware of something else belonging of these two categories ? Any other idea to meet my goal ?

NB I believe it's clear but I would like to stress the fact that I'm NOT looking for a distro for an old laptop

How small do you want the footprint to be?

My suggestion would be to set yourself up with a Debian net-install CD, but that's a biased opinion.

Indienick, thanks for your answer,

The footprint should be as small as possible and I agree with your…biased suggestion: I’ll probably give it a try. The only fear I have is that I’d like to start with no applications but with a full system support (wireless support, etc.): will I be able to add the correct modules making the selection only on their name ?

Absolutely.

What Debian does when it installs X, is it installs not only the xserver, but also ALL of the available drivers. What you may find yourself doing once in a while, is installing one meta-package and then uninstalling a whole bunch of packages that you know you don't need (but were installed by the meta-package).

It is a slight pain, yes, but the only packages I know of that do it, that I have come across, are "gnome" "kde" "xfce4" and "xserver-xorg".

Might consider gentoo. Might want to do a bit of reading if you are not familiar with linux though. Build it as small as you want or use portage to manage your packages.

BeaFanatIX
http://bea.cabarel.com/

PCFluxBoxOS
http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...ease_id=538615

Luit Linux
http://luitlinux.sarovar.org/

I second Debian...once you have the base installed, just apt-get install whatuneed.

Thanks to all for your useful suggestions.

Going deeper I have an additional question for the Debian supporters. Which face of Debian you recommend me: Etch, Lenny or Sid ? In the latter case why not Sidux ?

The basic way this works is, the moment somebody creates a package for Debian and submits it, it goes into "unstable" status. After it's been there for a while, and no horrific problems still exist, it gets promoted to "testing". After several months in there, it will eventually move on to "stable".

You start out with Etch, but by editing your /etc/apt/sources.list file, you can change your system to Lenny or Sid status.

If you're running a server, STABLE STABLE STABLE. Even running a desktop, I won't commit to unstable; unstable is, IMHO, for tweak-freaks.

Arch is another distro that would be worth looking into. It's base is real small but it makes it real easy to build whatever you want on top of it. I actually prefer Arch's package manager, pacman, over apt. I think the repositories aren't quite as big as debian's but there's hardly anything I've needed that wasn't available. And if you do find something that doesn't have an available package it's real easy to make your own packages.

Thanks, Mcmillan, you're pointing me to the distro that is...#2 in my ranking! I'll give a try to that distro...after having tried Debian.

I'd suggest Gentoo minimal install as well. It's about 100 megs and repositories are huge. You need considerade amount of patience and/or prior knowledge of linux however.