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Sorcerer Review, and News of Impending Doom
osworks writes: "There is an review of the Sorcerer Linux distribution over at linuxworld.com that is worth a read. I've been running SGL on my Inspiron for a month now, and have the same impression as the author. It took a really long time to install, but was educational and rather fun. Some discouraging news near the bottom about how the maintainer needs some development help, or it will be the end of Sorcerer. This is one of the most exciting new distros to come along in a long time, and that would be a shame."
I just installed Gentoo last night--or started it, rather; the compile process takes quite a bit of time. What I'd like to know is how these two distributions compare, especially in the package management department. Considering that both compile the software on demand, it would seem to be a question of dependency resolution. Has anyone got experience with both of them? does one have any advantages over the other (aside from sorcerors cool nomenclature? :)
I too have been using it for a month with very little hassle. I installed lilo on the SGL partition so that I could use grub which I already had installed. I have only done this with a broadband connection so internet wasn't too hard to set up.
Spencer Ogden
It does work on the mbr if you follow their instructions, edit lilo.conf to show the last word on the boot line to read disc, and then install to the mbr. It's perhaps not highlighted as well as it could be in their docs, but it's there. I found the install time consuming, and it's easy to make a mistake by not RTFM carefully, but it's really a painless, well thought-out install process imho. I would hate to see this distro fall by the wayside. It's truly unique, exciting, very well thought-out.
They're at: http://www.rocklinux.org , They've been around a while, and much of the ideas are similar re: rebuilding the whole thing locally.
Have you painted a shed today?
Not being a BSD user, how does this distros 'spell casting' system
compare to BSD ports? I've heard ports does a similar operation
of downloading code and custom compiling it.
Also, Rock Linux puts out a distribution where you basically compile all the packages, but I don't think it has the update ability that Sorcerer has.
It looks like a fun distro to try.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
[SGL has a] script that locates the latest stable source code for the application, downloads it to your system, configures it for your machine, compiles, and installs it. Pure magic.
Sounds familiar...
C-X C-S
I have sorcer installed with 256mb and a 2gb root partition in addition to my regular 500mb home partition. This does not seem excesive to me.
Spencer
Spencer Ogden
I have all three of these installed on my hard drive.
Sorcerer is pretty interesting, and certainly easier to use than the others, but if you have problems... good luck. The web page is spare, and the mailing lists aren't really busy enough yet to make for a good replacement.
As far as I can tell, Gentoo is made by Debian types who wanted to be able to use the BSD ports system to download and compile all their software. Perhaps they prefer the GPL to the BSD license. Anyway, like Debian, Gentoo has a "Social Contract". Functionally, you can do the same things that are possible in Sorcerer, although the commands are slighly more complicated, and less friendly to newbies.
Finally, there's FreeBSD, which has many more programs in its software collection than either Sorcerer or Gentoo. Frankly, unless people are really against the BSD license, think the Linux kernel is much better, or need to play some game that's tailored for Linux, I would recommend going with FreeBSD. Not only does FreeBSD have many programs, but it has many more port maintainers to track whether the system is working.
That said, I'm going to Sorcerer and Gentoo on my hard drive, and will periodically check to see if their software collections have become competitive. If either had ports for as many programs as FreeBSD, this would be a much harder decision.
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
for fun&education. like, if you were hacking up something new would you just stop doing it before you have to just because you eventually have to stop doing it? having experimental distros certainly isn't a bad thing in my book. once you start thinking i dont have time for this or that or this has already been done you might as well give MS your CC-number
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Gentoo Linux is an excellent distro that is very similar to Sorceror in the fact that you compile everything from scratch. It uses a Free-BSD style ports system, and it has a command-line driven package tool that's similar to debian's apt-get. The portage tree is huge and contains thousands of apps. One major advantage over Sorceror is that Gentoo has a very active development community, and it isn't in any danger of dissappearing anytime soon. If you want a distro where everything is compiled explicitly for your hardware for blistering fast speed, you should check out Gentoo. It's my favorite distro, and I've tried virtually all of them.
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
It seems that every few weeks there's some new distro-related story on /., all asking pretty much the same question, in one form on another ;
Which distro is best for what, and why?
A site that answers most questions one might have about pretty much any distro is www.distrowatch.com
RPM, self-healing? My ass! RPM is like Microsoft software, it tends to break itself. It doesn't help that many packages basically *require* --force to install because of weird dependency issues (but they work fine afterwards). Besides, neither software heal's itself, you generally have to do it manually. (There is --rebuilddb for RPM, but you generally use that for when RPM hoses the database out and hangs when you try to install (or remove or query) any packages).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It can be a boon or a curse, depending on how much you really know about the packages you are installing. In theory, you get a pretty clean, smooth system as you only install the bits you specify, and you can hand tune the compiles and dependencies such that you don't have to install unwanted bits just to get what you want to work, and it will do all this without breaking the package manager (i.e. if you go from a non-RPM in redhat, those files are now kind of rogue).
.cf files.
Unfortunately, there are pitfalls to be a ware of. One is that the occasional package is overlooked in terms of updates. For example, xmame is outdated in grimoire, so I manually edit the grimiore on every update to make sure it doesn't overwrite my more recent copy witha n older copy.
Another thing is that by rolling your own custom configuration, you are really exploring brand new territory. No one has tested that particular combination of packages to see if there are any issues, and by mixing the latest and greatest of everything, invariably you get some mismatches that produce unpleasant results if you don't know what to be careful of.
Also, the compilation of some packages on some hardware, particularly XFree. For example, if you have a Voodoo3, you need to get glide3 separate first. Even then you have to use tdfx for DRI rather than TdfxDRI or whatever is offered in the menu, as the ifdefs don't work in the
As to performance, yes it is highly optimized and you can omit debug symbols and such. However, it uses 2.95.3, which results in a more stable distro, but in a way counterbalances the advantages of compiling yourself, as the 2.95.3 doesn't optimize for x86 nearly as well as gcc 3...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It builds and bootstraps a basic utilitarian GNU/Linux installation all from source packages.
I think its great as both a production system and an educational build/install process.
The nice part is you end up with a fully functional linux you have built yourself. You will know _every_ package installed and why.
And all the mystery of linux will be revealed in your build process, its very educational.
Now, there is an partner group with the linux from scratch folks called automated linux from scratch.
From the automated linux from scratch site:
"Automated Linux From Scratch or ALFS, is a project that aims to create a generic framework of an extenable system builder and package installer using XML to describe the process.
It's main goal is to automate the process of creating a LFS system."
I have never used it, but I have used the straight linux from scratch and it is wonderful.
Wax on, wax off baby!
I asked this question of the SGL staffers awhile ago, and here is the answer I recieved. Somewhere out in the wide world of linux distros there is a Sourcer linux. The name Sorcerer, instead of Sourcerer was chosen to avoid confusion as much as possible.
a bit more about me http://www.advogato.org/person/trelane/ or my private page http://trelane.net
(This will end up being almost an article/review in and of itself, some of which may be redundant, but I will attempt to keep that to a minimum.) /.'ing the dependancy resolution and casting process have become MUCH more rebust and stable.) after casting the system a sorcery update will install the latest versions of the pacakage (some developers recommend doing this nightly, however I doubt that even on the computer I'm currently building that it would finish before the next night's upgrades). /usr/bin/ioahwoithjalwerh is, you have installed all of it and your knowledge of what's on the system is COMPLETE. this allows HUGE advantages
SGL was created to automatically solve dependancies on a minimal system bootstrapped off a small cd iso. the entire distribution is written in dialogue/bash. from there they add 'sorcery', a dialogue app somewhat similar to the initial package selector in debian potato's installer. allows you to select and modifiy package groups in the grimoire. the packages are downloaded and the interface is similar to debian where you answer yes/no/maybe questions as cast downloads and processes the files. (note that since the last
DOWNSIDES (and yes there are a lot)
A: TIME: Sgl can take a week to do what a binary distribution can do in 30 minutes. a stable working system
B: effort: you have to understand the system, or else you will break it during casting
C: patience: this is a much and almost deserves to be capitalized with time.
UPSIDES
A: RPM: No messy RPM/DEB (and please debian purists I do like deb better but source is still more pure)
B: optimization: from a custom kernel as a start to -fno-expensive-optimizations, it creates bulky code that runs REALLY fast and extreamly efficiently, and bulk in compiled code can be a good thing as the processor isn't used to remove the corners cut by the "optimization process"
C: you know the entire system: from the libs installed to exactly what
D: creation of cast scripts: it's BASH, it's easy, and frankly even I can do it (gropes his bash howto) RPM is tricky if you've ever read through it, BASH makes it easy.
a bit more about me http://www.advogato.org/person/trelane/ or my private page http://trelane.net
edit /etc/pcmcia/network.opts
/etc/rc#.d dirs...)
/sbin/dhcpcd /usr/sbin/dhcpcd so the pcmcia script can find dhcp.
say "y" to DHCP
blank the static values.
Remove the networking scripts from the other run levels, since the pcmcia script starts networking for you. (both S and K, in the
ln -s
run:
/sbin/dhcpcd -k
/sbin/dhcpcd
reboot
viola, magic.
I just submitted a minor fix for the install script relating to this yesterday =)
(as the email sean dot power at uc dot edu)
Arglesnaf
Frankly, the idea of compiling absolutely everything from source 'just because' seems a little bit of a waste of time. The vast majority of software will only see very very minimal performance increase compared to a well built Debian package with the usual careful choice of compiler flags. (Note: compiling for your CPU's architecture vs. generic i386 makes little difference today since all modern CPU's do very extensive instruction scheduling and out-of-order execution.) Furthermore, from what I saw of Sorcerer, the chosen compiler flags are system-wide instead of being based on the individual packages needs. This is not wise. So, I personally think that Sorcerer is redundant considering the quality and ease of use of Debian source packages for the few programs that can really benefit from hand-tuned compiler flags (such as data compression or encryption software). You just edit the rules and run two commands.
Download compaq`s compiler (ccc) from their site and recompile some apps with that (those which dont rely on gcc specific quirks) and you should see an even bigger difference.
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the Nvidia deal is slowly but surely changing for teh better. you can already get gl drivers for freebsd, but I am not sure as to their stability.
not sure about vmware tho
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
host> rpm -qa | grep libstdc++
... :
Red Hat knows exactly what it's doing. The problem is that you are talking without a clue. Please don't post on subjects for which you don't have a clue.compat-libstdc++-6.2-2.9.0.14
libstdc++-2.96-85
host> rpm -qi compat-libstdc++
Name : compat-libstdc++
Summary : Standard C++ libraries for Red Hat 6.2 backwards compatibility.
Description
The compat-libstdc++ package contains compatibility Standard C++ libraries that are used by Red Hat Linux 6.2 C++ binaries and KDE 1.x C++ binaries in the current distribution.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.