Seeking a concise Linux installation checklist

[Matt Graham]

From: keith smith <klsmith2020 at yahoo.com>
> I agree with bloat.  Seems Linux just keeps on growing.

Users keep demanding MORE FEATURES, so the space that software requires keeps
going up.

> I wonder if there is a "thin" Linux.  Of course right out of the
> box.  I have no time to optimize Linux or M$.  

Of course.  However, it'd be missing one or more of the things you really
like, and you'd get upset about that.  The least bulky distros are probably
Arch or Gentoo or Debian, but getting those up probably requires more time
than you're willing to spend.  As such, you're probably stuck with dealing
with a bunch of disk space getting eaten.  Let's see, CentOS 5, 600M / , 1.9G
/usr , 203M /var , 40M /boot .  This is for a production box with some X11
stuff and a few dev libraries and things installed.
A CentOS 5 orkstation?  450M / , 4.8G /usr , 152M /var .  More dev libraries
and a whole bunch more X11 user programs and documents.  This is acceptable
when regular disks are >= 100G, I think.

> I sometime think of the good old days when Linux fit on a handful
> of 1.44MB micro floppies.

The Good Old Days, when men were real men, women were real women, and real
users wrote their XF86Config files by hand using /bin/vi !  And getting sound
required sorting through a huge list of hard-to-understand parms for mostly
undectable ISA cards!  And playing most video required compiling mplayer by
hand!

Seriously, many many improvements have been made, and if a 2011 user were
given a 1999 distro (and 1999 hardware) and made to use it, that user'd have a
hissy fit.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see