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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've used and loved mandrake for some time... sorcerer's update functionality is far better than mandrakes, and that is basically what open source is all about: GETTING THE SOFTWARE INSTALLED.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Gentoo has got the whole pack together. Excellent support and tutorials from the developers. Not to mention the 100% optimization.
i like the thought behind SGL, but i think SuSE has kinda beaten everybody (except perhaps debian) with the update/config tools in YaST2. `/sbin/yast2 online_update` with an internet connection and usually before you can get a 2nd cup of coffee, there's a nice list of packages to download and update/install, all pertinent to your system. my only desire is for http connections for high-security areas that don't have ftp access ...
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
GIMP? LILO? Firestarter? Joe? Gnome?
The list goes on. Linux is full of weird and funny names. Personally I think it helps you remember the names of tools better. It's called Sorceror Linux, so why not have a command called cast? Seems logical for me.
Rather than call something a long name that may be descriptive, and accurate, why not use these shorter, easier to remember alternatives. It makes it a far better UI.
Damn, it's a good thing Linus didn't/doesn't subscribe to this philosophy. From what I read it sounds like he really wants to keep the project up, but he needs help. If I find a free minute I might look at the spells and see if I can help out, maybe you should do the same.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
This may be meant for system administrators, but maintaining more than a handful of sorcerer boxes sounds terrifying. I for one just don't have the time to compile Gnome every time Dell comes by to deliver another server box.
Managability quickly becomes more important than that squeaky clean feeling once you've got more than 10 systems running. I guess that makes me a sucky admin, but I really can't care. I'll have to stick with the Red Hat network and up2date over this, thanks.
Sourcerer is a brilliant idea, but may be ahead of its time. Downloading everything from source and compiling requires a lot of CPU horsepower (not a problem nowadays) but also lots of bandwidth. Many people still do not have the bandwidth so binary distributions are invaluable. However, I must admit that over the years I have used Slackware as a base OS and then built all my updates from source as and when they appear. This guy has the right idea. It would be a shame to see it fail.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for choice. But I have to wonder if it's wise to keep creating new distributions instead of trying to consolidate the ones there are.
I have been using Linux at home for over six months. Installed it myself, learned to use it myself; still, you guys might consider me a newbie. So let me tell you, as a newbie, once I decided to take the plunge, choosing distribution was a major headache.
Check the Net. A lot of opinions, plenty of "favorite flavors", but not a lot of good advice, like "Mandrake is easy to install, but RedHat is easier to use".
Maybe I'm ranting. What I'm trying to say is, it's hard to get someone to try Linux, and when they do and are faced with 10 choices, without a lot of help in making a decision, it is discouraging. So, turning those 10 into 11 hardly seems a great idea to me.
Then again, IANALGY (I Am Not A Linux Guru... Yet) ^^
gets started.
Somebody doesn't like the way that X distro does things and decides to do it "right".
That's the nice bit of flexibility in Linux/BSD, but it's a little frustrating too when you are trying to find support for your favorite distro.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
Agreed. The moment I lost my faith in RPM was when I saw this on the mozilla FTP site:
Red_Hat_6x_RPMS/
Red_Hat_7x_RPMS/
Two different RPMs for different "versions" of Red Hat?!? I thought RPM was supposed to take care of dependencies automatically? (note: the reason for this is that Red Hat, for some unknown reason, shipped mutually-incompatible versions of libstdc++ in 6.x and 7.x.)
That was also the moment I decided to switch to Debian - now *those* developers *care* about proper version management. Bye bye, Red Hat.
I did, and was saying, why not have a command called cast? Why does this imply not reading the article. I've come across the distro before as well.
And "You haven't read the article did you?" - should be "You haven't read the article have you?" or "You didn't read the article did you?"
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.
... once you've begun using source-based distros you will likely find you can no longer stomach the issues that binary based distros, even one as well engineered as Debian, bring with them.
Our enterprise is currently using Debian for many tasks. However, we are evaluating Sorcerer and Gentoo as a replacement.
Why?
1) Compiling everything from source 'just because' isn't a waste of time. What you overlook in your truncated 'just because' is that by compiling the source optimized for your hardware, against the library versions on your machine, you insure a level of compatability, and reliablity, that cannot be insured when mixing and matching binary libraries and applications. In short, you are compiling everything from source just because that is the only way to insure maximum performance and reliability on a given machine.
2) The speed increases are notable. Your assertion that architecture tweaks vs. generic compilations make little difference are not born out by real world, emperical testing. Debian (my favorite distro before trying Sorcerer and Gentoo), even Mandrake compiled with i586 optimizations, is noticably slower in performing many tasks (like video capture and editing, smooth window scrolling in KDE, web browsing in mozilla) than either Sorcerer or Gentoo compiled from source on the same hardware.
3) Distributions introduce their own level of bugs. Source compilations against existing libraries minimizes distribution-specific and distribution-induced bugs. Things like library version mismatches, subtle changes in behavior that break things but are unobvious, plague Debian, Mandrake, et. al. but are virtually eliminated by Gentoo and Sorcerer. What is more, the source based distros tend to stick closer to what the software authors intend in the installation of their software, reducing bugs that result from shuffling files or doing other "non-standard" things (from the orignial source author's point of view) in order to comply with the distro's file placement policies (for example). This isn't eliminated, as gentoo and sorcerer both have their policies, but it is reduced significantly vs. Mandrake, RedHat, and Debian.
4) What is more, gentoo and sorcerer are able to remain closer to the current state of development. While one may initially dismiss this as "upgraditis" and, at best "nice but risky and not necessary," it turns out to offer significant advantages, advantages that in my experience outweigh any disadvantages.
- one gets bug fixes immediately
- as important, the cycle of develope/test/report bugs to the author/fix bugs is tightened dramatically, with the author getting feedback in days instead of weeks or months
- one gets important new features immediately
- finally, if one doesn't like the current version (e.g. X 4.2 vs 4.1) using the older version instead is a trivial matter, with recompilation of dependent packages a relatively painless process when the version is changed, be it upward to a newer version, or a reversion back to an older version.
I cannot emphesize enough how many longstanding bugs, particularly distribution-related bugs, that have dogged us from RedHat to Mandrake to Debian, simply do not exist when running gentoo or sorcerer. What is more, we can use X 4.2 today, not months from now when it finally gets into Debian unstable. More importantly, we can use X 4.2 in a very stable environment, with one complete heirarchy of distro-induced bugs virtually eliminated.
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.
Both gentoo and sorcerer allow individual ebuilds and spells (respective terms for suites of scripts which download, compile, and install a piece of software) to override and/or modify their respective compilation options. The "system wide" options and optimazations one sets are defaults that work for most ebuilds/spells. This is far wiser than hoping each ebuild/spell maintainer will think to optimize their own compilation (many would not, and many others would err on the side of caution). When optimization flags cause a problem the ebuild/spell maintainer typically strips the offending optimization out of the compiler options (a small sed pipe does the trick) and the spell or ebuild builds and runs fine.
Source distros are hands down better, easier, and less buggy than binary distros, despite their young age and "green" state. I encourage you to give one or the other a try
And no, "apt-get source --compile" isn't at all comparable (though it does make Debian immensly more useful than many of its binary-distro counterparts). You still have the plethora of distro-induced bugs that comes with any binary distro as large and complex as Debian.
Gentoo and Sorcerer aren't free of bugs, mind you, but they are free of several classes of bugs that exist in binary distros in addition to bugs in the software itself, and in the distro's configuration and layout. The difference may not sound like much, but in practice it is quite significant.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Please tell me how Kaos is offtopic, when it does the same thing as Sorcerer.
/. topic. Face it, BSD is 3 times more popular than linux in terms of users.
The rest is a joke, but it could also be an accurate description of almost any
User numbers count more than the opinion of geeks, so it's fair to say Linux is dying. BTW, I hope someone metamods me up soon.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer