Linked by Steve Mulder on Fri 31st Jan 2003 07:35 UTC
Why, you might ask, would anyone want to build their own operating system? It's really about being in control and knowing what's going on.In the next few paragraphs I'll explain what motivated me to take on this project, the recipe I used, and what I like about it.
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.
I looked on LFS and I would say Gentoo is much better.
If you set your USE flags to exlude almost everything then you would get a pretty lean system. I used gentoo to bring up the basic Linux - kernel, gcc and bintutils. And then I build the rest from pieces - got directfb and X from cvs , fluxbox and Opera with static java compiled in.
Whatever you say guys, it's still not as responsive (in X) as BeOS living on another partition. But it's damn fast in plain tty.
If you look on history of gentoo you'll see that these guys passed through LFS stage at some point of time. And please, don't overestimate the effects of "-mcpu=" flag and such. If software is good compiler optimization may give you 10-15% gain in speed. Any claims about "lighting fast" system due to "-march" and "-O6" is BS - you won't see the 10% difference. Any visible speedup (or slowdown) is most likely a result of configuration change.
On the other note - doesn't it look like Linux started associated with "bloatware" ? Red Hat 8.0 comes on 5 CDs , for God's sake. More and more articles about lean and mean linux distros are poping up on OS news - Crux, Knoppix, Gentoo. Can we spot a tendency here - like a split in Linux Community: a huge flock of newbies goes in Lindows direction with fancy backgrounds and DVDs full of soft and small geek group chopping and carving their linux systems from sources with dangling libs and include headers dated November 1996 ? One is proud that his Linux system look like Windows "but much better" and the other one proud that his 486 can play MP3s.
Just a thought