UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all

I've been a Debian user since solidly since about 1997 so I'm fairly experienced Linux user as a whole but unfortunately the monoculture has hit be hard recently. I'm working off a Laptop a lot of the time which spends up to 2-4 weeks without an Internet connection. A few weeks ago it blew up with no Internet access possible for about a week leaving me SOL. I had a Debian usb stick which I can boot off but the basic system is pretty useless without my usual toolset such as texlive, valgrind, gcc etc.

I decided to keep a set of Debian DVDs floating around with me all the time in case of such a thing happening in the future. Unfortunately I don't like the idea of downloading and then having to shift 8 (!) DVDs around and any update DVDs that are released at each version checkpoint.

Time to change!

So the question is: are there any compact distributions which I can bring a decent desktop environment with development tools and texlive up on which don't require me to carry so much crap around and don't require an Internet connection?

A couple of DVDs are fine. Just not 8!

DSL (damned small linux) is meant for that purpose, you add just the modules you want.
You will find that a lot of the things you want have come with loong dependency lists.

gcc for example has about 15 last time I had to do this kind of thing.