I may have to leave Crux

[hazel]

I seem to have hit a chord! Apparently I'm not the only one with problems because someone on the Crux development team has now set up an rsync site with binary packages, including Firefox. I heard about it through the Crux mailing list and have just installed Firefox from there.

I have a 256MB swap partition; I admit I didn't think of making an extra swap file just for this build but it sounds like a good idea. I think I'll try it next time around because I hate to admit defeat.

Actually compile times don't worry me much as long as the build succeeds. I like to watch stuff compiling; it's hypnotic. And the really big jobs like gcc (and Firefox too before now) I put on at night and check them in the morning.

I didn't know there was a graphical version of links. I'm definitely going to investigate it. I love simple lightweight programs. That's why I recently gave GRUB2 the boot and installed LILO.

And I won't be leaving Crux any time soon. Not as long as I can keep my software up to date.

[hazel]

Jay, in many ways, Links graphics is the perfect web browser for a distro like CRUX as it is small, easy to build and very fast... just like CRUX! It won't have the features of Firefox though, pictures and text are pretty much it. Web page navigation has almost no lag.

Just installed it and I'm using it now. It's very austere. But you're right, it's blisteringly fast. And no advertisements or blank windows! I need to keep Firefox because one or two sites that I use a lot require javascript, but I could get fond of links.

[jayd512]

You guys are right...
Bare-bones all the way, but very snappy!
I can see how a lot of folks could use this quite easily.

[Jonathan183]

Slackware uses binaries in .tgz format which makes me remember something that may benefit hazel if she hasn't tried it already. rpm2targz (in ports) will convert packages that can be installed without compiling. There's also deb2targz. I've used both when up against a difficult compile.

thanks for the info

I seem to have hit a chord! Apparently I'm not the only one with problems because someone on the Crux development team has now set up an rsync site with binary packages, including Firefox. I heard about it through the Crux mailing list and have just installed Firefox from there.

I didn't know there was a graphical version of links. I'm definitely going to investigate it. I love simple lightweight programs.

I think binary packages for things like firefox are a step in the right direction

Ed: got rsync info from here

[elija]

Slackware uses binaries in .tgz format which makes me remember something that may benefit hazel if she hasn't tried it already. rpm2targz (in ports) will convert packages that can be installed without compiling. There's also deb2targz. I've used both when up against a difficult compile.

The repositories in Slackware are spartan compared to most distros. They have the basics only and most installation in Slackware is done using Slack Builds (SlackBuilds.org). This involves downloading the source code and slack build file and using the slack build to compile the source and create the tar.gz package for installation. It's a simple process that even I can do but I'm not sure that Slackware would have any advantages over Crux when doing a large compile in such a case.

[Dapper Dan]

It's a simple process that even I can do but I'm not sure that Slackware would have any advantages over Crux when doing a large compile in such a case.

elija, that sounds a little more involved than when I was using Slackware but I've often used .tgz packages when faced with compile problem I couldn't figure out. In most cases, the Slackware package would work fine although I'd occasionally have to symlink some libs. Have you seen crux4slack? It was its predecessor, cruxports4slack that got me interested in CRUX in the first place when I ran Slackware on my home machine.