Valefor

So in the past three nights I’ve installed linux three times on my desktop. My laptop’s hard drive died and I needed to get a linux system up to date. I have a slightly broken version of Ubuntu on my desktop (tons of beryl add on packages cluttering up stuff) so I decided to try Fedora again.

The install went great but I decided I would get sick of not having certain packages. Then I decided the next night to try Debian. The installer had some trouble when partitioning but I got through it and finally had a working Debian system. Unfortunately etch (stable) is STILL to old for me as it doesn’t even have Emacs 22 yet and is stuck on Gnome 2.14. So I upgraded to testing which right now didn’t have the nvidia driver. So I upgraded to unstable… I really don’t want to run unstable. I LOVE the idea of a system with a rolling release (like sid) where I’m always keeping up to date and new packages get introduced quickly. Of course the problem is that huge bugs can go into unstable cause it’s not “meant” to be used. I don’t like that idea at all. Plus I’ve had issues with unstable in the passed due to not being able to install software cause dependencies were missing.

This finally led me to look for what I think I really want. A rolling release binary system. I like binary for quick installs (I’m sick of using Gentoo) and I like rolling releases since it keeps me up to date with software. I don’t want to reinstall when new releases come out. This lead me to two different distros (if you know of more let me know!). The first is Arch which I have used before. Due to lack of packages and bugs creeping into the main repos I left it and am now going to try Foresight. Foresight is based on rPath’s Conary package management which seems very cool. Basically it’s a version control system with package management added on. Best part is it has Emacs 23 in the repo. I need to add packages for my favorite addons (nxml and slime) but it’s still awesome that this distro has gnome 2.18 and emacs 23.

I will be making conary packages and if all goes well submitting them for nxml mode later. We’ll see what the process is like for new packages. Should be fun!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under Computers, Foresight, Kelsin, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.