On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 05:15:03PM +0800, Zak B. Elep wrote: > So, what can we do to remove this 'fat'? Probably the quick and dirty > way is to strip a running system of this excess baggage: unneeded > apps, tools, games(!) and other stuff. With package managers getting > better nowadays, this seems to be the easiest way to get Linux lean > and mean ;)
That depends on where you're coming from. Stripping down something like Red Hat 9 or Fedora Core can be quite a chore, and getting rid of all the excess baggage we don't really need for our purposes gets more and more complicated. It's the main reason I switched to Gentoo. Only disadvantage is that I spend a lot of time building new packages from source. :) To those poor blighters still afflicted by RPM, they're gonna have a hell of a time trimming the fat. > For the more sophisticated, turning off daemons and long-running > processes are even better ideas. However, the real solution would be > to inform people of the hows (and whys) of the Un*x system and its > structure as opposed to Windows (and perhaps other OSes). > That way, people would begin to understand the little > 'eccentricites' that pervade each OS, and (hopefully) make their own > decisions as to fixing, tuning and customizing their Linux system. Few newcomers, using today's distros, are ever exposed to this in a serious way until they try to do more ambitious customization. The more modern Linux distributions look more and more like black boxes than their forebears, but their nature still allows you to rip the covers off a lot more easily than Windows, or even proprietary Unix variants. It's just getting a harder (but it is doubtful that this will ever become as hard as their proprietary counterparts make it), but certainly it would be a Good Thing to have this trend slow down some. -- dido "The only thing of value passing through a politician's brain is a bullet." -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
