a crackpot idea i had

[dep]

begin  Collins's  quote:

| Not that I want to pee on your cornflakes, but you must be smoking
| pretty good weed to come up with that idea!

um, those aren't *my* cornflakes. so somebody is going to be 
surprised.

| What you want is gentoo - onetime pain (compiles, compiles),
| lifetime gain.  gentoo is (mostly) LSB compatible, very current (or
| even bleeding edge, if you choose), and it only takes a few hours a
| week to stay current.

when did it become lsb-compliant? it certainly isn't fhs-compliant. 
probably my lone objection to it is that it reinvents so much stuff 
that shouldn't have been invented in the first place. otherwise, 
youbetcha, that would be a route to go, especially on machines that 
run current boxed distros too slowly to be of much use. (this came up 
in my little first review of suse 8.0 on the site -- someone 
commented that very thing.)

| All of the effort you would put into developing this retro-distro
| could be spent putting up a state of the art gentoo system.  In
| fact, if you like it, you could produce tarballs and with minimal
| effort distribute that.  You could use the gentoo CD for booting,
| generating a filesystem, etc., then provide instructions how to
| untar you tarballs and modify the setup to complete a working
| system.

the beauty -- one of the beauties -- of 2.4 was that it was easily 
manageable without being authoritarian. you could decide what *you* 
wanted to do and then easily figure out how to do it. it was friendly 
both to novices and to those who would fire up a text editor to edit 
the stuff in /etc. and it managed to painlessly teach users linux 
along the way. it additionally provided industrial-strength 
stability, ease of upgrading using standard tools -- skills learned 
with it would transfer in large measure to other distros -- and was 
better than any distribution i've ever seen in getting the user 
comfortable, even fluent, with the system.

i'm thinking less a retro distribution than the distribution that 
caldera would ship today if they hadn't gone in the direction they 
have. i do not begrudge their having done what they believe they have 
had to do, even though i disagree with it. but due to those 
decisions, i find i'm left without a distribution that makes me 
happy. suse doesn't, red hat doesn't (and there are other valid 
reasons not to use red hat), mandrake doesn't. debian is 
findamentally at about the same place 2.4 was, though they'll be 
sending along a new distribution soon -- is is leap year yet? -- 
which pretty much leaves slackware. there is no linux qua linux, in 
the sense that 2.4 was. i think there oughta be.
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the 
envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.