Small debian based server distribution

[Elazar Leibovich]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 10:31 PM, geoffrey mendelson <
geoffreymendelson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Because UBUNTU is not intended for people who want to customize their
> system beyond adding or subtracting whole packages. If you want a feature
> not compiled in, you can do it, but are no longer able to use their packages
> which means not using their update and dependency system.
>
> If want to add something they don't include you can, but if it depends upon
> a library they do include, there is no way to stop it from being updated and
> your program breaking.
>
>
I'm curious, since I'm having the very same problem on CentOS/RHEL. There
are many basic packages which just doesn't exist in the main repository
(say, python 2.6) and I'm not sure how to add them in a nice way to the
distro.
Currently I'm just `make install`ing it from the source, but it has all the
downsides you mentioned.
I'm not sure what's bad with Ubuntu/good with Fedora which magically solves
this problem.

(and BTW, customizing your OS beyond adding packages, is, sadly, not a great
idea in any distribution in the current Linux state of affairs)


> They also do not test very well, I've had to use older kernels when the
> latest new one would not boot.
>
> I'm all with you for that. What I really like in recent versions of
Windows, is that everything is so highly QA'd it rarely fails.  Ubuntu
managed to break during the fresh installation from the liveCD on Dell
Inspiron 1525 (ie not some bizarre hardware), I had to go through some hoops
to finish the installation.
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