Bare canvas distro of choice?

[RedSquirrel]

In the past, I've gotten good mileage from minimal installations of Ubuntu and Debian. These days, I prefer either Gentoo or Slackware for a minimal base.

[Kinetic Being]

I have been _distro-hopping_ for quite some time now, and I thought it would be nice to finally find a _niche_ so to speak, to fit into. That said, I have looked at Arch/Gentoo and both caught my attention. Yet the fact that it seems they do not have a LiveCD available is kind of a downer, since I currently do not have a CD reader available (please do not shoot me).

Kind regards,
Ben.

You don't even need a Live CD to install Gentoo.

Just use the Ubuntu one to resize your partition for another one for Gentoo, then go back into your regular Ubuntu (or other) installation, and just follow the steps in the guide for a stage3 tarball. You do everything in a chroot environment anyway, it doesn't matter where you are at that point. You can use the Ubuntu Live CD if you want, but I prefer to be in my regular setup to listen to music and such...

This way you have all the comforts of your current setup, while installing Gentoo. Plus, you can take your time and do it right, because you can still use your computer to watch movies, listen to music, or surf the web. The whole installation is just done through the terminal.

[sub2007]

I'd definitely recommend Arch - I think it's an excellent bare canvas distro and provided you follow the guide shouldn't have too much difficulty installing it. This will help a lot if you are looking to make the switch to Arch: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide.

I believe that there's a way of installing Arch via FTP without a CD using UNetBootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) but I've never used it so I'm not sure of the details of how to do it - there are instructions at the site.

[init1]

TTYLinux
http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/