Dear fellow Crux-users, Recently there was some discussion in the IRC channel about how to make crux more `alive' and `attractive'. Being a relative new user I would like to share my thoughts. First of all, Crux has a lot of good things to offer: It's simplicity and script based orientation are unique. The package management through ports is simple but effective. Also there is some good documentation (but may be improved). And (last but not least) there's a friendly and helpful community. When I started out with Crux it took a while before I had everything up and running. Although I had used Arch for some while, went through the LFS-book twice, there was still a lot of ground to make up before I had my laptop configured the same way when using Arch. I had to hone several skills: building my own kernel, creating some udev rules, setting up networking using wpa_supplicant only (I know nm is at hand) and so on. Although the somewhat steep learning curve belongs to the way Crux works, there can be some minor improvements made which may help newcomers finding their way around more easily. First of, maybe Crux can become a rolling distro, with a new iso every month / 2 months. In practice it already seems to be. There are unofficial updated iso's and once you got everything installed everything can be kept up-to-date. As a new user I used the official iso (which is good practice I think), but after building the kernel, running a sysup was a bit of a showstopper. Almost all of the packages needed to be updated. When using the more recent unofficial iso, this is obvious not the case. Secondly, there is a lot of good documentation -especially on the Crux specific parts- but having two sources (Handbook and wiki) is somewhat confusing sometimes. Maybe merge the handbook into the wiki with an entry for installing Crux (like the installation guide on the Arch wiki)? The guide will walk the new user through a basic installation with links to several options (e.q. encrypting harddrive, using different bootloaders). At the end of the guide there can be some links to other entry (how to install packages, e.d.). It would be helpful if there is a basic `how to compile your own kernel'-tutorial. Something along the lines of `make defconfig', enabling audio and video support, untick some of the wlan firmware drivers, etc. Copying the bzImage and System.map and updating the boatloader. Lastly a guide on creating and maintaining your own repo (which is part of the charm of using Crux I think), would be very helpful. Beerman / Tim's guide would be a great starting point IMHO. https://gist.github.com/TimB87/6cf010c0c10d67faf98ae03e62ffb029 As for the documentation, for the most part it's a matter of reorganizing. Maybe a `further reading' section can be added at the end of an entry, with links to useful sources like the Arch wiki / offical kernel documentation and so on. The goal here is to keep it simple (of course ;-)) I'll be happy to help out with (re)writing some parts. What do you think? Would this be helpful? Or are there other / better options? Kind regards, Hans