Sourcemage, under the leadership of Ryan Abrams (of BeGroovy fame), is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of “casting” and “dispelling” programs, which the team refers to as “spells”. New features include new dependency sorting, ‘invoke’ (used to be ‘skry’) a menuing tool for installed spells, a number of bugfixes, and some new asthetics.
Sorcery 0.9.0-RC1 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Sourcemage is much simpler and nicer to understand than other sourcebased distros. But it also has lots of coolness, which seems to be important too 😉
…is how does it compare to gentoo
i wish gentoo would hurry up and get 1.4 out the door
But Sourcemage has the better foundation ( my .02 € )
If the real inventor Kyle hadnt been such a egomaniac. Sorcerer would be better than Gentoo, but now Sourcemage has quite some catching up to do. But with its simplicity and the some more userinput the gaps between Gentoo and Sourcemage will be closed i am sure.
I’ve found Source Mage GNU/Linux (SMGL) to be easier to both install and use, compared to Gentoo (haven’t tried Lunar or Sorcerer (for a while, anyways)). SMGL also has a simpler setup than RH and Mandrake, with a “graphical” installer based on ncurses and (most) of the packages are already compiled with the latest gcc (3.2) and in the works for the latest glibc (2.3.1).
A more in-depth review will be done when 1.0 is released (1 day left!
).
I really want to know this real bad: Why the heck did Sorceror was abandon? Personal problems? Fleeing to BSD? Something?
Personal problems and infighting if I recall. As popularity of the distribution grew, I think so did the demands on Kyle and Sorcerer development. The distro is still alive though and works well. The grimoire is updated daily and the sorcery and augur tools continue to add new features. The sorcerer community seems quiet though…not much traffic on the messageboards.
I hope Kyle continues to innovate and hope Lunar and Sourcemage find successes too…