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"y'know, if you compiled that from source like Gentoo does, it would be a lot faster..."

Gentoo's worthless and weak. You should have compiled it on Source Mage. :)

I've used sourcemage for a about year or so and I absolutely love its package manager, "sorcery". You type "sorcery" in terminal and it opens an ncurses menu where you can set compile flags and other package manager settings. You can also use the same sorcery menu for browsing/installing/upgrading/removing packages but it's really quicker to check out the man pages for "cast", "dispel", "gaze", and "cleanse", and then just use the command line for package management. When sorcery installs packages, it asks a bunch of questions about dependencies and the next time you upgrade the same package, it remembers the dependencies you chose last time.

I also tried lunar recently. Lunar seems to be rather similar to sourcemage, except they call their package manager "lunar", and they have also different names for the other package management commands. Lunar doesn't appear to support rebuilding the whole system, which I like to do after upgrading gcc, glibc, or binutils. In sourcemage I type "sorcery rebuild" and it rebuilds all the installed packages. In lunar the equivalent command "lunar rebuild" didn't seem to do much anything. I also feel that I get much better control over optional dependencies and build options for individual packages in sourcemage, so I decided to dump lunar.

Sourcemage has pretty up-to-date packages: gcc 4.3.1, glibc 2.7, and so on. Openoffice2 (2.4.1) is only available as a binary package. In sourcemage it's really easy to track the latest development versions of KDE4. There are two alternative package collections ("grimoires") that you can choose from: "test" that is updated every day, and "stable" that is updated once every month. And then there's an additional "grimoire" for games ("games") and also one for non-free and/or binary-only packages ("z-rejected"). There are over 5000 source packages available in sourcemage -- that's more than in most other distros. Sourcemage follows a similar policy as slackware: they prefer not to modify upstream packages by adding any distro-specific patches, except when packages fail to compile.

I see currently only two problems in sourcemage: they haven't released a new installer for a while, and they still officially have only xorg version 6.9 (newer versions of xorg are unofficially available, but you need to jump through extra hoops to install one). The sourcemage mailing list discussions suggest that both of these issues might be solved before the end of this summer. In the meanwhile I'm using xorg 1.3.0 that is not overly difficult to install (the instructions can be found in the sourcemage wiki's xorg-howto, under "using old repository").

Here are links to the mailing list archives and xorg-howto, in case anyone is interested to learn more:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/sm-discuss/

http://wiki.sourcemage.org/HOWTO-xorg

Gentoo's excellent documentation has helped me a lot in configuring my SourceMage system. :)

Package management and most other aspects that are specific to SourceMage are well documented here: http://wiki.sourcemage.org/

This is how you manage init services in SourceMage:

telinit list
telinit enable|disable <service>
telinit run <service> status|start|stop|restart
telinit move <service> <runlevel>

how many packages are there in the SourceMage ports tree (whatever it is called there), and how fast are they updated when new versions are released upstream?

SourceMage calls packages "spells" and a collection of packages is called a "grimoire". http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Codex I have four grimoires installed: test, stable, games and z-rejected. "test" (which I mainly use) has new packages/spells while "stable" contains mostly the same spells that are in "test", only these have been more tested and bug-fixed and, hence, the spells in "stable" tend to be older than those in "test". Then there's the "games" grimoire that includes, you guessed it, games. And "z-rejected" has non-free stuff and binary packages. So let's see how many spells are there in these grimoires:

$ gaze grimoire stable | grep Total
Total spells: 4268

$ gaze grimoire test | grep Total
Total spells: 4488

$ gaze grimoire games | grep Total
Total spells: 314

$ gaze grimoire z-rejected | grep Total
Total spells: 141

That's more than in most smaller distros, I guess. Anyway, I find that pretty much everything I need is already there. But you also asked how fast are spells/packages updated in SourceMage. The simple answer is: quite fast. :)

The more elaborate answer is that if you want new stuff fast, then the test grimoire is the way to go ("scribe add test"). You may meet occasional bugs but reported bugs are usually fixed quite swiftly. I checked the DistroWatch page for SourceMage and most apps seem to be the latest versions. It says that OpenOffice is still version 1.1.5 in the "test" grimoire but actually there's a binary package for version 2.0.3 in z-rejected. GCC in test grimoire is version 4.0.3 and GLIBC is version 2.3.6. Also, SourceMage hasn't yet moved to the modular X.Org -- they use version 6.9.0. Most other programs should be the latest versions -- in the "test" grimoire, that is.

One word of warning, though: When I rebuild glibc from the "test" grimoire after the installation, the package manager (called "sorcery") told me that "Glibc spell doesn't know your architecture!" (my CPU is pentium3). I should probably become a responsible citizen and report this bug, but actually I'm quite lazy and I haven't yet got around to do it. Anyway, I edited /var/lib/sorcery/codex/test/libs/glibc/BUILD and commented every other architecture except my computer's (GLIBC_ARCH=i386). After that small bump on the road, my ride with SourceMage has been pretty smooth. :)

I like building things from source because I may want to have as few things built as possible, and because certain options set by default may break a system. I also like compiling because it offers the user a chance to support anything from a Pentium 4 to an AMD K6 (or lower), along with MMX, MMX2, SSE, SSE2, and 3DNow!.

Another advantage in my eyes is that it is possible to get the newest features without a long time before passing into a stable environment intended for a server on my home PC. I use X11R7 and the CVS version of Gaim on Gentoo, for example. Even SourceMage, with its far fewer patches and the slightest older software options, has met my needs.

The last plus is that as long as the originally installed version from the CD (or otherwise) is new enough, it'll be able to be updated to the newest, as Gentoo, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and SourceMage show -- though NetBSD and FreeBSD have their system sources located outside of their Ports and Pkgsrc systems, respectively. This contrasts from when I was using Red Hat Linux 8; it fell out of support for a while, and the structure of the system was dated enough (compared to now) that upgrading was a hassle.

try http://www.sourcemage.org/ instead. Gentoo has some major design flaws that source mage avoids, number one is python, number two is the sheer undocumented pile of code that is portage.

Coding it all in bash is better anyways.

It's a good thing, too, his code is shit. That's why I use http://www.sourcemage.org/

Somebody here said that LFS is better when you have a script to run its installation steps overnight in unattended mode. SourceMage is this kind of script, only more. If you're keen on LFS, want to learn Linux, but don't have patience to go through mundate things (like typing ./configure approximately 1,000,000 times, including false starts), please check out SourceMage. We won't disappoint.

so what, no other distribution uses source to compile its distro?

http://www.sourcemage.org/

http://lunar-linux.org/

Perhaps not what you meant, but gentoo is not the only dependency resolving source-based distro

Source Mage GNU/Linux uses a boot system that allows parallel execution of init scripts, while preserving dependencies. The change is modest on my old laptop though. sequential parallel

Sourcemage Linux is very easy to administer. All dependances are atomaticaly taken care of. Many companies are being tricked into thinking that because tons of unused and vunerable apps are installed atoumatically that those distros are worth paying for when they are theroreticaly as bad as windoz.

what about SourceMage? I use Gentoo, but I was considering SourceMage along the way, and it looks like a valid competitor.

And Sourcemage GNU/Linux, my distro of choice.

Moll.

I can't remember what it's called. Gentoo?

Yes, Gentoo is one of them. But there are others Source Mage for example. But a bootable self contained system is more than just bzip2 and a compiler. You need, kernel, libraries, a shell, various command line utils, make, binutils, linker, compiler, etc. When it is all there we are talking about multiple MB. Do you really want to have to download nine copies of this when you only need one of them?

I'm using SUSE as my primary distro for a couple of years now, and I think SUSE has evolved greatly, supporting Linux standardization efforts widely.

While they are definately producing one of the most polished distro's available, it deviates from most linux distributions somewhat dramatically

There will alway be differences between different distributions, but I think that LSB and FHS compliance is the key. SUSE 9.0 is e.g. certified to comply with LSB Runtime Environment for IA32 Version 1.3

I still don't know how exactly the init system works.

The init system is designed according to the LSB specifications. I personally find it very easy to use.

I also found that you HAD to do things SuSE's way ... you couldn't do it yourself because YaST would stomp all over your changes.

Why this partly was true for older versions of SUSE, the sitaution is much better now (or my knowledge on how to do things improved:-). Of course, there are things like when you have a configured X and then start the X config programms, you'll get an altered XF86Config. But I find that's hardly surprising.

I happily alter config files by hand all the time and I experience no problems using YaST on other occasions.

(again, you can't just update say, package X from a source tarball because SuSE will throw a fit).

You know what package management is all about, right? How can you expect the system to know about your nicely compiled update if you don't tell it? You can't get it both, the comfort of managed software installs and the freedom of source upgrades without spending some work on it.

I frequently install software from source, either newer versions than the ones from SUSE or stuff not supplied by them. The key is to build packages out of them. It's really not that difficult (it gets difficult when you want to build a whole consistent distro, that's why I happily pay for SUSE's boxes - they do all the dirty work).

It's probably not bad for novice and intermediate computer users; I'd reccomend that experienced users who want a pretty desktop with little hassle use Mandrake.

I'd recommend SUSE for both :-) I think SUSE is a very nice distribution usable both for the newbie and more experienced users. Heck, I also like Debian and SouceMage, but in my experience, SUSE delivers a good allround solution. That's why it runs on my laptop, my desktop, and some servers around here. The cluster, otoh, belongs to SourceMage :-) .

So, yes, my experiences do differ. But that's OK, isn't it?

Diversity is certainly a strength of Linux.

Your link, "http://sourcemage.org/", didn't work.
Use http://www.sourcemage.org/ instead.

I don't know why some sites these days still require "www.".

I don't know about Gentoo, but as far as installing module-init-tools/modutils, kernel and related stuff Source Mage GNU/Linux has been there for quite some time.

I hate to sound like I'm trolling, because I'm really not trying to. My own observation is that Gentoo is more about zealotry than anything else. I have seen other distros with the same idea of building everything from source, and they aren't riddled with zealots. I'm a Red Hat user who has bits and pieces of SourceMage on my system. I hang out on #sourcemage on irc.freenode.net. Those people are certainly not zealots for their distro, they just like working with the code, building things from source, and knowing where their code comes from.

-uso.

Rather hard when the computers come with Windoze, I think. And people don't YET have a reason to switch, but they should...XP's activation means I am no longer going to use Windows after 98, my next box will be running Sourcemage GNU/Linux. (And this one dual boots Headrat)

-uso.

Only one week, not one decade? ;)

I bet it's prolly something like this for SourceMage:

# cast -c gnome

-uso.

If you prefer your sources un-tampered with as I do...mainstream distros aren't the way to go.

Sourcemage GNU/Linux might be more up your alley - from my experience, you "cast -c" a program, it downloads it from the program's main site and compiles it.

That's real nice, and why I'm moving from Head Rat to Sourcemage.

-uso.

SourceMage - Gentoo without the zealotry ;)

# cast -c openoffice

-uso.

What the world needs is a book on WINDOWS security. Not YABOUS.

This is the answer to your Windows security problem.

I guess this answers the eternal question...

"Does it run on Linux?"

Seriously though I think it's only a good thing that this box uses one of the most hardcore of all Linux distros in its core (hmm, maybe SourceMage GNU/Linux is more aimed at the hardcore Linuxer, and let's not forget Gentoo), and now, finally, the back end is being ported to Linux. An all-Linux solution is only a good thing!

-uso.

When Source Mage was first being formed (which itself was after a series of ugly fork-related situations) everyone made sure to put a lot of effort into creating strong Debian-like guidelines to ensure that it would be controlled by its community and not have to deal with the corruption that seems to be present at Gentoo. It will be interesting to see if this controversy will push any users toward switching to Source Mage. More info about it here.

Though of course, I must say, you should probably save yourself the trouble of compiling all that crap anyway and just get yourself a real distro.

Look at the other sourcebased distros as well, ie Sourcemage. I'm too tired to post links, but tehre is also Lunar, the origional Sorcerer, and at least one other... Distrowatch has a list and package comparision.

Well, I thought they took paypal, but it looks like they do not. You can snail mail them money orders and such, though. From their subscription page:

Sign up for a TransGaming subscription at $5 per month, with a minimum three-month payment. Once you have created an account and logged in, you will need to choose your subscription period and make your initial payment. We accept most major credit cards, but at this time we do not accept debit cards or American Express. You can also pay by international certified check or money order for subscriptions of twelve months of more (US Dollars only); we will activate your account as soon as we receive it. If you would like to pay by gift certificate, please send the gift certificate number to support@transgaming.com and we will activate your account.

Please be sure that you have read the Installation FAQ list and other documentation on this site to ensure that your hardware and software meet the minimum system requirements for WineX. Also note that WineX is a work in progress and not all Windows games are supported.

That second part is important, too. One of the biggies is your video card has to be supported fully (with 3d) under Linux. I found out that my built-in radeon on my motherboard will not cut it as ATI has not (yet?) given the right info/drivers for it. Last I checked, NVidia cards were supported up to the latest with drivers (I think) from their site, and ATI drivers are available through Radeon 8500. There are open-source Radeon drivers and the Nvidia drivers are closed source (but regularly updated).

Winex is free as in beer if you are willing/able to compile from CVS. I was not able to do this trivially before, but I may have had other problems which are now more apparent under my current Linux Distro. Subscription gives you the right to vote for games you want and gets you easier-to-install binaries. Source-based distributions actually make it easier to compile from cvs, but they are not for everyone. Another option is to purchase one of the distributions which comes with Winex and a subscription.

My current favorite source based distribution is also supposed to make it easier to install the nvidia drivers, though nvidia's instructions for manually doing this seemed straightforward. I have not tried this yet, but it is looking more and more like that is what I will do to alleviate my 3d problem. I had planned to buy a beefy video card anyway.

I would also encourage you to get involved with LUGS in your area both by meeting with them when they have meetings and by participating in their mailing lists. These are excellent sources of information. You can also email me at rifter0x0000 at yahoo dot com if you want more ideas/advice/etc.

Ultimately we need more Linux resources on the net to help people, and people who use linux need to be a resource. I also think it is important that Linux users settle for nothing less than total functionality, in other words we should be able to use Linux for everything you would want to use a computer for. That is almost true now, with some caveats, but I want to puzzle out and eliminate the caveats. I think anyone who can code or write documentation should work on this goal as well.

I hope that you have good luck in trying linux. If it does not work for you at first, try try again and seek help. I tried many distributions befor eI settled on one I woudl like for my purposes, and then I changed my mind again :). But remmeber Linux == choice and if you don't like something about it, it is likel

In descending order of (my) preference:

• Lunar Linux
• Sourcemage
• SGL
• uOS

I don't consider myself a guru, but 'I would say I know enough'. I've done the whole LFS/source based distro thing for a while now so here's my take on things.

I think it's important to make a distinction between LFS and Gentoo/SGL/Sourcemage/Lunar/uPM. LFS is a book that describes the process of producing a minimal linux installation that is capable of building software. The source based distros provide scripts/tools that automate the build process for you. Which you choose is largly dependent on your needs.

It seems from your post that you are interested in learning what makes GNU/Linux tick: what files do what, what software is required and what's bloat, and generally what goes on under the hood. For this I found that there is no substitute for LFS, it took me from Mandrake newbie to power-user in a couple of months. This was a good few years ago and at the time there was no BLFS, I feel that that actually helped me with learning the stuff. LFS held my hand through the installation of the base system, but after that I was forced to RTFM, making my own mistakes and learning from them. After 2 or 3 months I had a fully functional system with KDE, apache and a bunch of other stuff. I also had learned many times more than I did in over a year of using mandrake.

My new shiney LFS system was a joy to behold, but it became a real pain to maintain. I found that an unacceptable portion of my time was spent updating software manually and it was effecting my productivity. This was around the same time that SGL first appeared on freshmeat. I had tinkered for a while with LFSmake but found that it wasn't flexible enough. SGL was wonderful, I traded a small amount of the total control that LFS gave me for a system that saved me 80% of the time I was spending on keeping my system up to date.

Unfortunatley there was a bit of a storm in the SGL teacup which resulted in SGL going offline for a while and 2 forks appearing (Sourcemage and Lunar). Initially I went with Sourcemage but I found that after a while it became too unstable and as I was using it for work I couldn't have that (it may well be better now, I've not checked it out in a while). I switched to Lunar and am still using it now. It doesn't provide the same education as LFS, but once that knowledge is aquired it provides a much more efficient means of installing/maintaining your system.

I should say that I did once try gentoo but I was put off by the complete lack of an installer. You have to jump through too many hoops (and triangles, hexagons and other polyhedra) to get the thing up and running. uPM also looks interesting but is still in a relativly eary stage of development.

To sum it all up: LFS cannot be beaten for it's educational value, but for day-to-day use Lunar suits me best.

See http://www.sourcemage.org/ All source, downloaded from the authors site and compiled to the settings and optimizations YOU choose.

If you want a true "your os" I would check out sourcemage. I've been using it now for 9 months and I think it's really neet. It uses a very unique package management system. It will build all your apps from source. Catching what files were installed and where, and allows you to uninstall them. The default option with the uninstall is to archive it somewhere. It puts all the files in a tar.bz2 and saves them unless you tell it to go away. That way if you want to reinstall it, it doesn't have to reinstall the whole thing, it just extracts it.
Just thought that was nifty. Also, since this is a linux from scratch type distro, everything is compiled for your architecture(sp?). Which is really neet, because I don't have a p4 or whatever they compile it for. I have an Athlon and there are certain features that when compiling for an Athlon (in Linux) that you get over compiling for P4.
my 2 sense....wait....

if the sniffer is trojanized, then it could possible hide such "activities". I actually read the article and it however seems that it was not the case here... phew :-)

MD5 checks work nicely. Sure pgp in theory is better but since md5's are cached locally, and a helluva lot faster to check the chances that they will actually be used and verified are seemingly quite good.

Which is to say in practice MD5 has caught rather a lot of these problems, and in quite timely manner.

As irrelevant as various source-distributions (e.g. lunar, source-mage and Gentoo) are at present in other respects, they make a nice 'canary' in the coal mine :-).

I was very close to using my last mod point to mod the parent down as flamebait because of that line, but decided it would be more constructive to reply.

There are a handful of other distros that do what Gentoo does, and some might argue that they do a better job of it (I won't get into that).

1. Source Mage - The evolution of Sorceror after it's original maintainer ran off, has been doing this for nearly as long as Gentoo (maybe longer even? It's close). Instead of "emerge gnome" you'd say "cast gnome", but other than that it's more or less the same thing - download, configure, compile, install with one command. It's all coded in very elegant and easy-to-understand bash scripts, which is kind of neat, but other than that it's very comparable to Gentoo. I believe they plan to release 1.0 on Halloween.

2. Other source-based distros - there are two other Sorceror-based distros besides Source Mage - Lunar and the non-free Sorceror. Personally I'd suggest sticking with the above if you want to go with a Sorceror-evolved distro though. I think there's also Rock Linux but I don't know much about that.

3. Debian. Apt-get downloads and configures and installs programs, but you save hours and hours on the compilation step by using binaries. Or you can use apt-src and go through with the compilation. Personally, I found that it was not worth the time to compile everything when Debian works just as well if not better, has a far more reliable, well-established testing system, and stays nearly as up-to-date (if you use sid, the "unstable" branch, which I've found to be more stable than any of the source-based distros). As for the alleged speed gain in compiling, that is more of a theoretical claim than a number-supported one, and I honestly do not notice a difference.

Parent - keep in mind that it is never a safe thing to say definitively "no other..." or "never" or any kind of all-encompassing statement - you're asking to be disproven. Certainly Gentoo is a nice distro, but let's not be close-minded about it.

Check out SourceMage. This is a linux distro that, with a little work, is always the most up to date Linux distro Ever. You get the source from many different locations, and it's the latest stable version. It also has a nifty theme to it, Magic. You "cast"(install) "spells"(programs) and it downloads the source and compiles and installs it, and creates logs of all that happens. You can "dispel"(uninstall) it. you can "gaze" into the "grimoire"(list of spells). Even if you only get it because you can cast xfree86 or cast linux itself, its fun!

ok made my monthly advertising requirement... :P

Source Mage (The distro formerly known as Sorcerer) checks MD5 sums on download if they are known. I don't have sendmail installed, so I don't know if it would have caught this one. I think so because the MD5 sum on file for sendmail was created on Aug. 20.

one quick comparison of the various source based distros can be found at http://www.distrowatch.com/source.php
which compares the various packages that each distro includes.

Now, personally I use Source Mage, so I am biased towards it. I have found though that often looking at the scripts on Gentoo that they seem many times larger than ours, and sometimes when looking at them, I often wonder what the person who wrote that script was thinking. Now granted, some of the more complicated packages do have more complicated scripts. But a lot of them only contain the very basic info of where to download from, version number, name, and a couple other fields, which come to about 10 - 15 lines total. Which I found easier to figure out my first time how to write the script. I think my first one took me only 30 minutes. After that it was much easier. An quick script now, can take about 3 - 5 minutes to create.

I just find the scripts behind the packages easier to follow in SM than in Gentoo. I also like the way that when you do an update in SM that it checks afterwards it checks to make sure all the packages still work. For example, if you do an update of libpng, which is a dependency of several apps, SM and Lunar as well will check to make sure that those apps still work, and if not will recompile them to use the updated library. Gentoo will only do that if it is a setting in the 'ebuild' file. for both SM and Lunar, it's built into the main scripting, and doesn't have to be part of the 'module' or 'spell' which are the equivalents to the ebuild.

Gentoo from my understanding is not as cutting edge as a whole as SM. For example, the main release of grub is version 0.90, but they have also managed to get the splashimage patch of grub to work. Ours is version 0.92, and the patches we could not get to work with that version, and yes we were using the patches designed for grub 0.92. So this can be seen as both good and bad. Good in the fact they have managed to get a feature to work we have not, bad in the fact they are a couple versions behind. So in that it's up to the end user which they prefer.

One big advantage to Gentoo, has to do with it's maturity. The fact that it has been around so much longer than the others.

A disadvantage I heard about from a guy who claimed to use Gentoo and was wondering about a reason to change to lunar was that gentoo doesn't have an installer, and that you have to do a lot of chrooting to do the initial install. SM, Lunar, and Sorcerer all have installers which are fairly easy to use.

I hope this helps. I tried to be rational about it, and I hope I got all my information on Gentoo correct.

Use whichever one you like. I prefer Source Mage, but that is me.

As for the development team on Lunar, congradulations.

Kyle is back running his own tree, apparently. The original tree he abandoned is now called Source Mage GNU/Linux (they changed the name to avoid confusion, after Kyle decided to jump back in again with his own tree).

But if you already know about the other source-baseds and just want specific information about Lunar, than yes, it does seem to be practicaly non existant.

It's back, but there is something weird about the licencing acording to the Source Mage (the other fork) site. On the other hand, I don't seen any mention of the licence on the Sorcerer site, so I'm not to sure about the details...

reasons for the existence of Lunar Linux
There were reasons for the fork of Sorcerer. See this page on the Source Mage site. But no, last I looked Lunar Linux wasn't very clear about these reasons. People should be required to have a good reason for making a new Linux distribution.
If people were required to have a good reason to start OSS projects, we would never have got Linux in the first place. I won't even bother responding to the rest of your argument.

Get a source distro! Nothing beats a compile-yourself distribution optimized for your system in every ELF:

lunar linux
Gentoo
Rock linux
Sorcerer linux
SourceMage

In the end... binary distro's are just like windoze

So he downloads the ISO and burns it to disc, as will every other geek. Lycoris can no longer afford to pay its developers

But seriously, while I think your logic is completely accurate, you're forgetting that Lycoris/Suse are not alone in the Linux for My Mom market. If I'm faced with the decision of paying $40 to install one of these versus downloading Mandrake or Red Hat, I'll opt for the latter (despite that annoying feeling inside that I *should* do the Right Thing and buy one of these). Unfortunately, until Mandrake and Red Hat start forcing me to buy their products too, I'll probably keep going with whatever's free. Hell, if they started forcing me to pay, I might be inclined to install Debian or (my personal favorite) Source Mage. After all, I'm the one doing the installation/configuration - my parents will still see the same pretty KDE interface either way. Even on their Windows machine, it's not like they ever delve as far as the control panel. If there is a problem with their computer, they'll be contacting me. (Incidentally, here's another place where Linux would be great - if I'm not home, I can walk them through starting up ssh and then from there I can just log in remotely and fix the problem).

While we're plugging things, I'd add that Source Mage definitely does a decent job of avoiding the addition of cruft in a way similar to Debian's. Every time an application ("spell") is installed ("casted"), Source Mage tracks all the installed files. If you want to get rid of a program, just "dispel" it and all the files will be removed. You only can possibly run into problems if you modify these files (Source Mage has an option to either delete or keep modified files...neither is ideal though), which generally does not happen except possibly if they install something to /etc/. Furthermore, you can "gaze alien" to get a list of all the files that are not being tracked by Source Mage, so that you can try to manually remove any cruft that managed to sneak in. Finally, Source Mage strictly enforces the LSB standards, and casting will never put anything in /usr/local/, so generally things that you install manually that can potentially add cruft have a good chance of being isolated in there.

Finally, I'd assume that most of the above is also true of Gentoo, though I can't say I know from personal experience.

cast foo

Sure Warez Dude!

Gentoo
Source Mage
Debian
Freshmeat - More Free Wares than you can shake a stick at.

Course, in the world of Free Software we don't need to write wares with a Z, 'cuase it's already free. ;-)

go check out sourcemage. they are, in fact, doing some of the very things you talked about in your post.

LINK CORRECTION ... [debian.org] ... should be ... [slackware.com]

heh!

But of course, that should actually read:

I'll just stick to the best distributions and watch the fun from afar

[grin]

Seriously, though, it is this choice that allows you to use and enjoy slackware, and me to use and enjoy Source Mage and Gentoo, others to use and enjoy Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, and so on, that makes the GNU/Linux community, and the Free Software community in general, so dynamic and so productive.

It is this choice the efforts like UL are trying to undermine, by promoting the myth that commercial and proprietary software vendors should (or need to) package their wares up for one or two reference distributions, rather than packaging them up in a distribution-agnostic manner as Blender, VMWare, Id, and Loki have done. This myth may serve the interests of the distribution promoters in question (in this case, UL), but it is a disservice to the GNU/Linux community as a whole by creating unneeded incompatabilities with other distributions and excercizing some degree of coercion for people to adopt the reference distribution instead. What is more, as other binary releases have proven, it is absolutly unnecessary.

It behooves us all, slackware, Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, and Source Mage enthusiasts alike, to stand up and make sure the word gets out to commercial vendors that they can, and should, package their software in a distribution-agnostic manner so that they can target their entire marketplace, and not just a portion thereof, by packaging their software in standard tarballs, documenting precisely which versions of which dynamically linked libraries their software requires, and providing a statically linked binary-of-last-resort in parallel that will run regardless (this is important as distros mature and the old version of the software remains desirable anyway, so it not only allows any distro access to the software, it also provides insurance that the software will run on most any GNU/Linux distro 5 years hence, or even longer, long after the state of the art has moved a great deal further along).

Best distro eh? Thats just *begging* to begin a flame war!

Well, yes, considering the best distros can be found here and here.

Personally I like the idea of United Linux. There's no reason that all Linux venders can't use the same base for rpm compatibility, etc. It'll hapen one way or another. Do you want one company to control the standards, or a shared effort?

I think the idea of UL is horribly flawed (and rather arrogant on its part), and the underlying premise of your reasoning for supporting UL equally flawed.

It isn't necessary to have One True packaging scheme, or One True distro to which all must maintain binary compatability, in order to effectively release binaries.

It has already been demonstrated by the folks at Blender, VMWare, Id, Loki, and others that it is quite possible to release binaries that are distribution agnostic. These real world examples, all of which install and run just fine on my Source Mage and Gentoo boxes, as well as my Debian, Mandrake, and Suse boxes, exist despite naysayers saying it isn't possible, and claiming that UL, or UL+Red Hat, bring a much needed cohesion to GNU/Linux.

Nonsense. It is an effort to impose a proprietary embrace-and-extended standard on a community that is doing just fine with consensual standards where they make sense, and a wide open, free and fair marktetplace that encourages choice everywhere else.

Telling commercial vendors that they should package their wares up as RPMs aimed at one (or two) distributions, when it is quite possible, and vastly more desirable, to package them up in standard tar.bz2 or tar.gz format along with a README listing the required libraries+versions, as well as a statically linked "last resort" fallback binary in parallel with the dynamically linked binary and thereby make them compatible with almost every distribution out there, is a terrible disservice to both the Linux community at large, and the vendors themselves who are being misled and excluding a big chunk of their target market.

This nonsense only serves the interests of the purveyors of UL, at the expense of virtually everyone else, and at the cost of our freedom of choice as GNU/Linux users. There is IMHO absolutely nothing good about this whatsoever, regardless of what your favorite distro happens to be, and even though I am not a Mandrake fan per se, I applaud them for their courage in standing up to this nonsense.

The old Sorcerer Linux is now actually Sourcemage Linux