Gentoo desktop?

[Christopher Browne]

On Jan 10, 2008 10:03 PM, Ian Petersen <ispeters-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> By the way, another nice feature of Gentoo is that it's easy to create
> a minimal system.  I've never used real Debian (only Ubuntu), so maybe
> it's just as easy there, but on Gentoo, you have to choose everything,
> so you can choose small system services or, if you're feeling
> non-standard, you can choose not to install a cron daemon or a system
> logger, or whatever.  You could probably do the same thing with
> Ubuntu, but in the Gentoo case, you start with nothing and build up
> whereas Ubuntu starts with a heck of a lot and you'd have to whittle
> down.  I think it'd be easier to build a small system by starting with
> nothing than by starting with a big system.

The "minimum" for Debian is basically the set of packages required to have:
a) Network connectivity working, and
b) Package management working.

That is what you need as a bootstrap in order to install anything
else, and is indeed pretty minimal.  To have less would mean you
couldn't upgrade the system.
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