Linked by Bob Minvielle on Wed 17th Jul 2002 19:18 UTC
There have been many articles as of late about the so called "source" distributions of Linux. Articles about "rpm hell" and how to get out of it. While I have been using Red Rat since the first release (and do have some things for and against it) there is no distribution that will please all of the people all of the time. Then again, that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices. Today, Gentoo Linux is my choice.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
I've played a bit with Gentoo and I must say it doesn't deserve the 1.x version. First, there is no simple way to install it; you have to do it by hand (make sure you have a printed version of INSTALL, or you'll have problems later). Second, as pointed by blindcoder, it has some really weird dependencies. Third, try to update some software on portage by hand; you'll see a lot of code, which seems a waste of resources.
) and the "spells" (think it as an eBuild) are simple text files with shell variables. Also, the spell manager allows you to choose what kind of optimizations all spells will have.
I'm not a RPM fan, so what are the other options? http://www.sourcemage.org SourceMage is the perfect (IMHO) source distro. It has a nice install program, the dependencies are sane (if you "cast" [the term they use to download/install a program] vim and don't have X installed, it will not build gvim - but you can cast it again after the X installation and have a nice full featured graphical editor
Gentoo looks like a 0.1 version near SourceMage...