I'm the current maintainter of "bluewall", a gnu/linux distribution based on debian(base) and pkgsrc. The goals of this distro was to create a simple system base to be able to use pkgsrc on top of it and progressively remove the debian stuff from the base.
It aims to be a minimalistic distribution, but dropping the debian bloatware is hard work for only one person with better things to do. Nowadays this project is stopped, but I would like to follow the development. The current base of bluewall is what all we want from a base system (gcc, make, no cron, no exim, no nano, ...). The X windows system can be installed from debian or from pkgsrc. And maintaining a pkgsrc system is almost easy and well structured. I know that none of this is 'suckless-style' but, it's a nice base for most of C developers. Maintain and organize a new distribution is really a HARD work, create init scripts, maintain packages, etc.. So, recycling other people's work is good imho. (bluewall is maintained by a set of makefile and shellscripts) It could probably be good to design a minimalistic and well designed dist base, (that I would really appreciate, because GNU sucks) Maybe mixing a bit of plan9, NetBSD, uclibc and related projects we could achieve a nice minimalistic distro. But this is imho a lot of work and I don't know how many people is interested on that. BTW, create a few debian metapackages to provide these programs with a basic configuration is really easy and all debian-based distros will benefit a minimalistic roof on top of a bloated base. FMI: http://bluewall.es.gnu.org/ --pancake > Hi there, > > during last week I evaluated Windows Vista during my freetime - > I'm not surprised... The whole system is too slow for me and > contains only few innovations I consider useful (well most of > them are also part of OS X, though I'm not uptodate with OS X). > > To a long-year X/wmii/dwm user the most annoying part in Windows > Vista is the inefficient cut'n'paste handling and the manual > window organization (even the mouse-driven Snarfing of Plan 9 is > faster than this braindamaged and inconsistent cut'n'paste > handling of Windows). > > The trip with Windows Vista lead to a reinstallation of ubuntu > on my notebook (because I had to re-partition my disk), but the > ubuntu installation also was very disappointing, because of > this retarded Gnome environment (XFCE, KDE and Gnome altogether > are pretty similiar to the Vista Desktop)... > > With each ubuntu/debian installation I have to install dozens > of packages to setup my system as I like it to be, this sucks. > I can't even use a live cd to run my environment on any computer > - the stuff by Michael Prokop called grml (www.grml.org) > contains too much stuff I don't regularly use - although it > comes very near to what I'd like to have. > > I also notice that there is no real Linux distribution with the > flavor 'designed for C hackers and 9 lovers' out of the box > (grml closes the gap for sys admins). So I got the idea that I'd > like to see a new ubuntu flavor called 9ubuntu for '9 lovers and > C hacker ubuntu' which comes packed with dwm/wmii and all > necessary tools for developing C code (*-dev, vim, gcc, > make, plan9ports,...) instead of those clunky desktop > environments. > > What do people think about this idea? Even if this might not > be officially supported by the ubuntu community, I'd like to see > something like this, because I need it. Is there anyone > interested to initiate such a project? > > Regards, > -- > Anselm R. Garbe >< http://www.suckless.org/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361 > >
