Lunar Linux 1.0 Released

Ivan writes "Lunar Linux 1.0 was released today. It's a source based distribution, with gcc 3.2 and the latest versions of packages such as Mozilla 1.1, OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 and GNOME 2 and KDE 3. From the about page on their website: 'In the beginning Lunar was a fork of Sorcerer GNU Linux (SGL). The fork occurred in late January to early February of 2002 and was originally made up of a small group of people who wanted to collaboratively develop and extend the Sorcerer technology.' Download the ISOs here."

Comments

ISO Download

[viper21]

Does this mean that the guy from last week will now have 38 Operating Systems on 1 PC?

Since the lunar-linux site is probably bogged down at the moment, you can probably grab an ISO from:

DistroWatch

or

LinuxISO.org

Why Lunar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly because Lunar Linux and Sorcerer GNU/Linux aren't quite as difficult as Gentoo. More of the installation chores are automated. For example, while Gentoo expects the user to manually chroot and copy the system over from the CD to the root partition, Lunar and Sorcerer do this automatically. Also, optimisation is broken down into a series of easy-to-grasp choices (the optimisation setting for really fucking fast code is labelled clearly) rather than expecting the user to muck around with CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS.

Best of all, IMHO, it's feasible (though almost time-consuming as installing software through FreeBSD's ports system) to install Lunar on a machine using a dialup. As far as difficulty is concerned, I'd class Lunar between Slackware and Gentoo. Hope this helps a bit.

--
St. Matthew, Patron Saint of Cheeky Programmers

Re:Point of source-based distributions?

[photon317]

For me it's not about the 2% speedup (well in some cases it's a lot better for certain apps, but I digress...), it's about the ease of source modification.

You see, if I have a RedHat isntallation that uses an RPM of apache, and I decide I need to tweak the apache source a bit, it's a pain in the ass. I suppose if you get really used to using SRPMs it's manageable, sorta.

With Gentoo, it's real easy for me to add a patch to an ebuild and re-install - or to unpack an ebuild, edit the soruce in /var/tmp/portage, and then finish off the install with "ebuild qmerge ..."

And well, a bunch of other things, but I guess the overall point is that for the draw is the power over the system, not the speed of the binaries.

Re:Read the comments under the announcement...

[jvmatthe]

I recommend Gentoo for people who want to be closer to the internals of their systems but don't want the "gasoline poured into gaping head wound" pain of Linux From Scratch. LFS is great for doing once for the experience, but since it pretty much lacks a packaging system (back when I tried it), it's not for me. I'm willing to do some babysitting of my system, but not at the level that LFS requires.

Gentoo promises a close working relationship with your system, access to the very latest packages, and a growing and generally helpful community.

Try it out: Gentoo home

See my other post in this thread for why I had problems with it initially.

More on the fork

[Apostata]

In case this wasn't posted yet, there are two major forks from Sorceror: Lunar (which I believe kept the main contributor of Sorceror), and SourceMage. SourceMage (who keep the nerdy witchcraft shtick happening) is approaching 1.0, which I believe is due for a Halloween release.

Link: http://www.sourcemage.org/

Sorceror was a cult-hit when it first hit the attention of Slashdot (late last year?). Many people raved about it, so I'm happy to see that both prongs on the fork are following the same tradition.

Re:More on the fork

[osu-neko]

For those who haven't kept up on the soap opera...

Actually, Source Mage GNU/Linux is not, technically speaking, a fork of Sorcerer. It is the original. However, after the Lunar fork, the old leader of Sorcerer, Kyle Sallee, blew a fuse over having his distro forked and declared Sorcerer dead. The problem being, of course, Sorcerer, being an open source project, is not only open to forking, it can't be closed down simply because one guy has decided to take his toys and go home. The rest of the Sorcerer team said, "Hey, no it's not!" and continued maintaining the Sorcerer distro. Then Kyle decided to get back into the game, and called his own tree (now covered by a closed source license to prevent forking) Sorcerer. The original Sorcerer team then changed their name to Source Mage GNU/Linux to avoid confusion and emphasize their commitment to an open source licence, and they drew up a debianesqe social contract.

Phew! Anyhow, that's the Readers Digest version of the story. Thus, confusingly, the distro that was called Sorcerer is now called Source Mage, the distro now called Sorcerer is a fork by the old project leader away from the rest of the old Sorcerer team, and the distro called Lunar is the original fork that caused all this confusion to begin with.

And now you have the rest of the story... :)

Re:Read the comments under the announcement...

[Hard_Code]

If you are coming from Win2k without much prior Linux or Unix experience I was seriously suggest installing RedHat or Mandrake. Give it a whirl for a month or so to get familiar, then when you think you are 'leet enough (i.e. your pain threshold has risen enough), try out a source distro.

I haven't tried out a source distro yet (it seems the only occasions I have to install Linux happen to be pretty bizarre network installs...so I usually just opt for RedHat because this is the *only* distro I've been able to get to install easily in these circumstances).