Very Minimal Installation

[JeffNetSite]

What Linux Distro can I use in desktop with very minimal installation but with supported drivers specially in sound. Thanks.

[GNU-Fan]

As the kernel houses nearly all drivers, one could argue that the such a most minimal system consist of a bootloader (GRUB), a kernel with all necessary drivers compiled in (e.g. Linux), and a small standalone shell (like sash or Busybox). You may want to look at "Tom's Boot Disk". There exist a number of alternate graphics systems, like the kernel's framebuffer device, DirectFB, SVGALib, FWE or FBUI, to name a few.

But as soon as graphical userinterfaces based on X come in, you are better of to take a lightweight distribution like Puppy-Linux or DSL.

If you do not mind looking at alternate operating systems, there is the Haiku, which is a small BeOS successor, dedicated for mulitmedia applications.

[_madman_]

LinuxFromScratch.org is a great option, but not for newbie's. I personally tried some distro's like DSL (damnsmalllinux) but they are almost a novelty or quick temporary fix.

You can try to force you distro to do a minimal install (this seems to be a bigger and bigger task every year). I did that with Debian and as soon as I finished the install, "dselect" tried to add in a bunch more packages automatically, so I had to revert changes every time I used it to install a new package. The mail systems and other crap distro's try to force on you can get really annoying, I know.

Anyway I strongly recommend using a generic disto like Debian until you are familiar with GNU/Linux, then move to Gentoo or better yet LinuxFromScratch (version 6.3 is pretty decent).

[oz]

arch
crux
debian
gentoo

...those all allow for a base install then you add whatever you want/need, and of course, there are others.

[dxqcanada]

Gentoo is a source based distro.
A base install leaves you with a shell, development environment, and the kernel sources.

Easy to add (emerge) any specific apps after this.

Sabayon is based on Gentoo ... but I think it uses binaries so no compiling is required ... (I am a Gentoo user so I cannot say much more about Sabayon).