It’s a bit of a ‘new game in town’ as far as Linux distributions go, and is certainly not for the faint of heart, but gentoo is a rather streamlined distribution.

It offers three installation types, a very basic ‘enough to compile and install your own’, ‘a few tools’, and truly, ‘a few more tools’. All three fit in roughly 200M on a CD; it expects to be able to download and install off of a network.

It’s configuration files and scripts are a bit odd to get used to, when being familiar with Debian or RedHat, but are fairly easy to adapt to.

It expects you to create your own kernel, rather than defaulting to an ‘initial generic’ system, and does require knowledge of configuration scripts, and a bit of headwork. This said, after a basic install, it’d be rather trivial to roll-out as a starting point.

I like how minimalistic it is by design; rather than having the RedHat ‘Three CD’ installation method – if I want something, I’m rather certain I can find it myself, if it isn’t offered via the ‘portage’ system.