Preparing for Crux…
Later this week I’ll be installing CRUX, by which Arch was inspired, on my old Toshiba Equium EA60-181 laptop. I’ve got the ISO downloaded, will be burning it to disk today, and then I just have to wait for Folding@home on the laptop to finish and submit its current WU. I’ll be completely formatting the harddrive, installing over Arch. I dislike dual-booting, I have the tendancy to boot into what I’m more comfortable with, and I want to dive into CRUX and explore it!
Anyway, for those of you that didn’t know, CRUX is “a lightweight, i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users. The primary focus of this distribution is keep it simple, which is reflected in a straightforward tar.gz-based package system, BSD-style initscripts, and a relatively small collection of trimmed packages. The secondary focus is utilization of new Linux features and recent tools and libraries. CRUX also has a ports system which makes it easy to install and upgrade applications.“, and is currently in version 2.4.
I don’t really know much about it, over that what’s in that paragraph, and that it inspired Judd to start Arch, my favourite distribution. As the collection of packages is described as “small” and “trimmed” I expect I’ll have a bit of compiling to do to get everything I want up and running, I’ll endeavour to learn how to build my compiled sources into packages as I can with ABS.
I shall, of course, be googling for a CRUX beginners guide; though I doubt I’ll find something as comprehensive and brilliant as the Arch beginners guide. It’s more fun to dive straight into it, anyway. Guides that tell you what to do without explanation are boring; the Arch guide has a nice balance between explanation and instruction.
After CRUX, I shall be trying Debian, and then Slackware. I already have the ISO for those, and will be burning them to disc later. After Slackware, I will either go for Gentoo and then LFS, or diverge off into the BSDs, I’ll decide at the time. The only OS on my list I won’t be able to experiment with as much as I would like to is Mac OS X, as I don’t have OS X and the only person I know who does is my dad’s friend, whom I rarely visit. I’m sure I’ll organise something when I get on to that.
CRUX is high on my ToDo-list as well.
You’ve probably already seen it, but be sure to check out K.Mandla’s blogpost about the kernel compilation etcetera.
Also, the CRUX handbook seems pretty comprehensive. So I think that it will probably be all the documentation you’ll need. That and Google of course.
Anyway, good luck, have fun and let us know how you got on.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to use my old laptop for distro-hopping as I had hoped. The harddrive finally gave up last night with horrible screeching noises. I salvaged everything off it I needed, but it is now completely dead.
I’ll have to use my desktop once I get my new laptop, I like to keep my main machine relatively stable, using other ones for the experimenting. So, no distro-hopping until that arrives.