Roy J. Tellason, Sr. composed on 2015-08-13 11:58 (UTC-0400): > I've never looked at Gentoo, basically because from what I've read it > appears that it would be *way* more time-consuming. In terms of other It is more time consuming, waiting for compiles for every package installed. But, you learn things you'd not likely ever learn otherwise, and the result is you have more control and knowledge of your system, and a lot less installed software that you'll never use. > choices, I picked Debian since an awful lot of what else was out there > was derived from it. Now I'm not so sure of my choice. I *did* feel that Debian's LTS nature can be a compelling reason for choosing it. > it was a good idea to get acquainted with some distro that used a package > manager, so Debian seemed the logical choice. My favorite package manager was the youngest around until Fedora 22 was released, when Yum was replaced by DNF, making DNF the newest. I find openSUSE's Zypper and YaST2 combination unbeatable in terms of power, ease of use and friendliness. Zypper is cmdline only. YaST2 has ncurses and GUI modes. Both use the same RPM foundation and databases, so they can freely be switched between, just not both run at the same time. Their package locking system is simple and easy to use yet as powerful as anyone could hope for. ... >> To by default stop init prior to X startup, do >> # systemctl set-default multi-user.default > I'll try that just before I'm ready to reboot the system next. Mostly I > just leave it running... It doesn't matter when. AFAICT, default.target has no effect on anything already running. >> However, as with sysvinit, as with all rpm distros with which I am >> familiar, all the above can be disregarded, and yet not have X >> automatically start, simply by including a 2 or a 3 on the kernel's >> cmdline in the bootloader stanza you use. Debian and its derivatives >> (e.g. *buntu) using sysvinit differed from rpm distros by including X >> autostart in runlevel 2 and not defining any additional startups in >> runlevels 3-5. > The bootloader is another issue. I'm used to LILO, not GRUB. So I have > more to learn here, too. Note that there is both the original Grub, now typically called Grub Legacy, and Grub2, which some distros call Grub while others call it Grub2. The newer is significantly different, much more powerful, and much tougher to deal with manually if manually is your pleasure for configuration management. Grub Legacy doesn't support EFI, can be tricky or impossible to use with storage capacity >2TB, but doesn't cry the sky is falling when you wish to install it to a partition instead of MBR, nor complain when a vga= is on cmdline. Grub is my primary bootloader on every one of my many systems, always on a primary partition, never the MBR. Grub2 here is only ever installed to Debian or its derivatives, and not used to actually boot except when wanting to select a prior kernel version to boot. ... >> In openSUSE, changing the system level default WM session defined for >> the login manager has up to now at least been via >> /etc/sysconfig/windowmanager. > That file doesn't seem to exist here. There's a /etc/sysctl.d directory, > and a /etc/systemd directory, a lot of stuff to sort through. I don't think very many distros use /etc/sysconfig/ any more, if they ever did. I do think on openSUSE it's used mostly or entirely by YaST2. >> Other distros control it someplace I never seem to be able to locate. > That's one of the things that drives me nuts with regard to this stuff. > Lots and lots of complications, and it's not apparent to me why they > changed things to be that way, what the advantage is. It seems distros are more and more catching on that /etc/ is where sysadmin deviation from default configs belong while defaults belong in /usr/ along with the software. ... -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/