Hey mikshaw, thanks for the reply. I agree with you that the mydsl extensions are a good idea. In fact, despite the admonitions not to, I use them in my HD install quite a bit, and have found them to work well. btw, what's the problem with using them on an HD install?
One app I use this way is Grip, and to further prove the potential of the distro, I use it with an apt-get install of Bladeenc. Works great.
Quote (doobit @ Dec. 28 2005,13:04)
I would like to add that I don't think there is yet a single OS that does everything that everybody would like to do equally well. There probably should never be.
That's why bootloaders can boot multiple OS's The main reasons to avoid mydsl extensions (excepting UCI extensions) on a hd installation is:
The extensions, which at their core are just structured tarballs, can overwrite various library and other files and there is no "undo" or "uninstall" button once you have done this.
myDSL extensions are very similar to early Slackware packages in the sense that it is really a software delivery system and not a true advanced pacakge manager.
So dependencies are also not handled in mydsl extensions and the Debian apt "installed packages" list is not updated, either.
Finally, there is the whole "user must be DSL" requirement that is fine for single user livecd/usb/frugal installations but as you know can be problematic for mutiuser hd installations. Can this situation be improved? Sure, but who does it and when? The developers have a lot of other ideas in the mix meaning that it is unlikely that this issue (which is only an "issue" in certain situations) will be addressed in the foreseeable future. But then again, what do I know?
From your first post in this thread, it seems like a good fit for your needs would be either:
(1) A Debian netinstall with minimal additional software or bloated window managers
or
(2) A KNOPPIX "Debian Style" hd installation with a minimal window manager selected like fluxbox or icewm instead of KDE or GNOME.
I like the idea of a mydsl development section. It could be very helpful for people who wish to compile stuff from source.
However, like the other mydsl sections, it would also be a USER CONTRIBUTED area.
So if you would like to help out, please take some of the critical development libs/packages that you have installed and wrap them up into extensions and submit them to the testing area.
I'm sure that it will help people in the future who might be in the same boat as you.Hey cbagger01,
I wouldn't mind doing some of that work, but I need to A) figure out just what mydsl extensions are, and how to make them, and B) get to a point where I'm able to actually build software succesfully so I can put together the list of libs and stuff needed to get that far.
Hmm, looks like I'll dig out an old PC from the garage, set it up to do dev work, clean out the laptop (again) and start from scratch. It'll be the 4th time I load the distro in 2 months, which says something about how easy it is to load this.
Maybe it's time for me to put /home on a separate partition. --Under the /current folder in the d/l mirrors look in the /pdfdocs folder I have tried to put together some screenshot howtos for different things in DSL.
I am not fluent at compiling so no idea how difficult it is with DSL 2.0+. You could run DSL 1.5 and use Knoppix 3.4 as your compiling environment. That is popular for many. With DSL being so small there's no way to get around having to do some tweaking on many things. I use DSL as my daily distro with xfree and nvidia acceleration. There are alot of options. I encourage you to explore and we'll help all we can.
