I can see the appeal of manually dealing with dependencies on a very simple system. Many times, I have been frustrated by Debian pulling X11 dependencies when I try to install packages on my home server (I can't think of specific examples off the top of my head). Thankfully, Arch users and maintainers are fanatical about minimizing dependencies, so I've never run in to that problem in Arch. And even though Arch has been very stable on my desktop for over a year, I'm not comfortable with the idea of having a rolling release distro on a server, even if it is just my own home server.
Slackware or Gentoo might be fun to try on the Neoware thin client I've been playing with. So far, I've run Debian - which worked fine. I also tried FreeBSD, which got a bit complicated: I had to use NFS mounts for the ports tree, since I only have 1GB of memory to work with. And it turned out that there's no audio driver for FreeBSD. My end goal is still to have device that streams audio using the wireless card using MPD and NFS mounts, with lirc to control it. Debian nearly worked, but the audio skipped: I read that there are performance problems with audio in Debian, but they're not noticeable on any modern system, but they definitely show up on a 300mhz CPU. I tried to build the necessary audio packages by hand in Debian, but ran to problems - Debian's not really made for that. Arch would be ideal, but it's i686 only. I can't believe I find this stuff fun, I must be insane. Asa
