Hey folks!

I bought my linode for a few purposes:

1) Run a VERY BASIC web server (thttpd / lighttpd) with basic info, in case somebody stumbles on my domain.

2) Run a Jabber server all of my own... a little public square within my domain of ultimate control.

3) Run a Bittorrent tracker... for some personal bittorrent files. This way I don't clog up somebody else's tracker, and I can tinker.

4) Run a Bittorrent AlwaysOn(tm) seed... a BT Daemon that serves as a third point of download (My home box and my friend's box are the other two), just to make sure the files are available.

5) Run a hair-brained server program I've been working on that has a good possibility of going up in smoke every 15.23 minutes.

6) Surround that all with a firewall.


Now, for a while, I had been running Debian. But then one of my packages went bad, and I got angry and wiped the whole disk (another reason for my Linode... I'm not too proud to start from scratch).

I've tried Gentoo at home, but didn't like the superextralong booting when I tried it on my Linode. I've used Fedora core, and Mandrake (or what it's new name is), Ubuntu is Debian with a cooler name, etc.

I then tried Arch. I loved it! It was quick, barely did anything at boot, seems to be very very slim...
...but I hate the package manager with a vengence.

Or, should I say, with two hours of looking about, I decided that pacman wasn't apt-get or emerge and I was looking for the wrong thing.


So, I thought, perhaps I want to muck about with Linux from Scratch for the weekend? Anyone done something like that?

Or perhaps I should make up with Debian, and try again? It seems that I get about 1/2 through my list above before something wierd happens and I have to start over again. For example, I just got ejabberd to work, and thttpd did something wierd where it didn't start up, but it took the port 80 and wouldn't let go, I couldn't start lighttpd, nor could I delete thttpd.

Any advice? I've thorougly enjoyed blowing my linode apart, but I'd like something to show for my efforts . Perhaps I'm trying to hard?

I'd say make up with Debian. If you think you had problems with Debian, just imagine the problems you'll encounter rolling your own distribution. Just stick to the stable tree if you want to avoid the package breakage that can happen in testing or unstable and configure one thing at a time and make sure it's working before moving on.

My suggestion: Install Gentoo from the tarball - don't use caker's distro.

Result: Exactly the system you want, with emerge to keep it up to date, without the extra effort of Linux From Scratch.

Works for me.

_________________
/ Peter

I agree with gaveup, however looking at what you said you want to do, I suggest you go with Ubuntu - the next release (due any day now), has more up to date jabber servers, and I believe will also contain lighttpd. As you said, Ubuntu is basically Debian, but with newer packages

It might be a while before an image is available here, but its trivial to start with the current version and apt-get dist-upgrade.