Re: Can you build your own desktop Client?

On Mar 20, 7:08 pm, ray <r...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Best to install Gentoo from a minimal install, following the 'book' at
the gentoo.org website. You can include as much or as little as you want.
Even the minimum is 137 meg ISO.

I'm not as clear as I hope. But if there were a distro website that
made up the ISO on the fly, with just what I actually asked for, the
download would not be anywhere near that much. A few meg for the boot
& kernel, maybe 20 for a browser, and a meg for some utilities like
MC, Cfdisk, and XF86Config.

But rather than have all the drivers XF86Config on the ISO, have them
sitting on the server, and so you only download what you actually
need. As is, it seems the various distros always forget some things.
Some have a driver for my SCSI card, some dont. Some do well with my
oddball 1600X900 LCD, some dont. Some see my camera and recognize it
as a flashcard, and some dont.

No matter what distro I get, I end up with something it dont have, and
every single time I've tried to download and install a solution, it
has not worked. Often I get messages about dependency issues, but then
other times, no clue, no error messages, but no icon or trace on the
file system that its there.

So, my kharma being what it is, I wanna start by downloading the
kernel & boot, putting that on another drive, then one at a time,
download and install what the platform needs. Right up front. I dont
wanna waste time doing the whole damn install only to find out later
it dont work right.

I have been downloading and installing DOS software for nearly 25
years. It aint rocket science. If it dont work, it tells me what
driver is missing, and when I install that, it works. If I download
for Linux, I get told there are dependency issues, I dont have the
right C library. If I try to download that, it tells me I dont have
the right compiler. Its kafkaesque. Every time I download a
'solution', I'm told I need to get something more.

RPM, apt-get, .deb, it does not matter. gz, tgz, zip, or whatever, the
archive is fulla clutter that I have no idea what it is there for. Or
where it goes as it rips by up the screen. I think a lot of the
overhead is for network security and to prevent users from trashing
the OS. The programmers all work in netowrked environments, and get to
thinking its like that for all of us. It aint.

All I got is a terminal. Client. Gentoo.org has a rap about a security
problem with 'vmsplice'. From what I can tell, its caused by an app
needing direct write access in case it exceeds the buffer. If that app
is on your own desktop, no biggie. Its your app, its been scanned. If
it JAVA, hmm. And again, its a big problem in a network with highspeed
broadband running heavy apps like multimedia.

But out on my end of the net, nothing comes in fast enuf to over lead
the buffers. I should be so lucky. I would prefer knowing a bit more
about what is actually running on my platform. One reason I like DOS,
in ordinary use, there's no background for sabotage software to be
running in.

And if I can build up a distro from the kernel on, I'll have a better
idea of just what is running, and not bother running security risks I
dont need.
.

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