Linux from scratch question-sort of a survey

[Louie1961a]

I am thinking of trying linux from scratch, to build my own distribution of linux for use on the desktop (just a project, nothing commercial or anything). I am planning on including gnome and KDE. The overall goal is to produce a distribution that is light and fast (other than the obvious duplication of having Gnome AND KDE..I get that, and I want to avoid the gnome versus KDE war of which is better). I intend on using this distribution only on the desktop, although I may run SAMBA. I no interest in apache, or any other server packages. Given these constraints, which packages would you install?? Or maybe it is easier to ask, which package would you do without, and why? For isntance, can I eliminate lynx, would you include IPCHAINS/IPTABLES support, etc. When I load a distro like Red Hat, it seems that the tendancy is to load a bunch of packages that have similar or duplicate functions, and I would like to avoid that. I am interested in your opinions. Thanks.

 

[thornc]

Are you talking about LinuxFromScratch ( LFS )? Or something else?

I'm currently compiling LFS3.0 and its looking good, I'm doing a few different things like logging all
files that are getting installed!

My last LFS, I installed GTK+/Gnome Libs and QT/KDE libs to be able to run apps from those desktops
but I ended up using Xfce!

And lynx is a very usefull application!!

 

[n0cmonkey]

lynx would deffinately be installed on my system. Along with tcpdump (which some distros dont find necessary). I would personally forget both KDE and Gnome since they do nothing for me, but that is just personal opinion 😉

SAMBA would be fine if you are cursed with Windows machines on your network. I would include iptables for simple firewalling. Make sure you use plenty of optimizations, try and skip rpm's if you can.