Tech Blog

So, I said I favored Gentoo. I think I may need to retract that statement. I'm a fanboy of certain linux distros, I'm not going to lie, but it's based on the technical skill required to use those distros. I love slackware, gentoo, lfs, arch, etc. On the other hand, I'm not as huge a fan of the ones that hold your hand and do everything for you. I see this as an issue. Microsoft does that, Windows does that, hell, Mac does that too. It removes a certain layer of security. How does it do that? Well, on Ubuntu you don't know what packages are getting installed as dependencies and in turn what network services might be getting started, which opens your box up for attack. On Ubuntu (and other systems) you can avoid this by disabling services and checking what gets installed as a dependency. On Arch though, nothing starts except the bare minimum unless you'd like it to. It's a rather nice approach. Yes, it means that you can't just install apache, restart, and have a working web server. But again, isn't that a benifit? If I had a webserver install as a dependency, but I don't really NEED a web server, it just opens me up to attacks.

All in all, I find that I like Arch a tad bit more than gentoo because of it's amazing wiki, and from that it's community support (IMHO better than even Ubuntu's), and the fact that it's not a build from source distro, but rather one optimized for the i686 architecture.

I've gotten gnome up and running, as well as Opera, plus I have hard disk encryption + lvm working. I'm a pretty happy boy right now :]

Happy hacking.
PiklesOnFire