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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."
[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 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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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.
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