alexvader

Hi Forum,

This is my first post her, so Greetz to all of you gents...

I may be new to Crux, but not to Linux in general, started may years ago with RHEL4 x64 /Fedora, jumped to OpenSUSE/CentOS, then came the Buntus, and now i have two workstations in my Lab ( I am an aerospace engineer, most of the apps that I use are non-commercial software compiled from source, and are real RAM/CPU hogs, I do a lot of 3D modelling, F.E.A., C.F.D, Genetic optimization, and mathematical prototyping of control systems (design/analysis) ) with FreeBSD Current, and CaeLinux, and two Lappies, one with Slackware64 1
3 ( great distro btw ) and the other with Debian Lenny 64...

So... i kinda' know my way around... but being new to Crux, I want to ask a few questions... :

#1) I want to install Crux to an external USB HDD in one of the lappies, I wont have a wired internet connection to do so, so after installing the packages, and compiling my kernel, will I be able to enable X, wireless and some other basic stuff...?

( I have already tinkered a bit with Arch, and I did this after wget(ting) the whole repos core, contrib, and base to a folder and building my own local repo, but Arch is binary based.... while Crux is ports based... think this approach wont work w/ Crux...)

#2) Is there a package repo for Crux, that will allow me to install a binary package without having to compile it from source... ( I can compile rather large packages,and I have already done so in Slackware, and I prefer doing so in very resource intensive applications ( I generally compile them with Intel C++ and Fortran compilers, and Math Kernel Libraries support) ) but building something like Gnome from source is a bit of a lengthy adventure... ... in FreeBSD there is the pkg_add -r <whatever> which will fetch and install what you want... is there something alike in Crux...?

#3) How does Crux ( I am considering to use the german version w/ 64 bits from Ecarux ://ecarux.de/crux86_64/]crux86_64) compare with Slackware and Arch in terms of speed of execution and RAM Footprint

...Slackware once fine tuned is hard to beat....

BRGDS

Alex