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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 The fork occurred in late January to early February of 2002 and was originally made up of a small group of people who wanted to collaboratively develop and extend the Sorcerer technology.'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."
I'm currently running Gentoo/i386 1.4 RC 1. Now, I was quite happy with 1.2. Nice and quick, latest bells and whistles. 1.4 is nice and quick. And as unstable as you like.
I keep up to date with my emerges, avoid masked packages and the like. It still breaks. kdebase has problems. Mozilla 1.0 is still in the main tree and the default seems to be to compile it against gtk2. Snort was broken for a while.
They seem to want to avoid standard ways of doing things. Where are the rc?.d directories. Do I really want to spend time trying to understand a new system?. The --help for the gentoo tools is pages long. The speil you get when Linux boot has gone in favour of a black screen.
Flexibility is one thing, but I do have things I want to do with my systems. I don't want to have to build huge swathes of system again to fix a niggling bug.
I admire the philosophy behind gentoo, and I admire the skill with which the portage system has been crafted, but at the moment they're only good for geeks with, as the initial poster said, clock cycles to burn.
Having said all that, I've just been running RH 8.0 on my laptop and getting used to RPMs after have the flexibility is a bit of a slap in the face.
I would say that source based distributions are the way to go, sort of, but only when they're properly QA'd, meaning the time it takes for the latest packages to get to stable takes a long time (but heh, not Debian long!). And can they ever really be QA'd when you do what Gentoo does - heavy optimisations for a wide range of processors, building with the options you want?
What I'd like to see is a hybrid system. RH/Mandrake/Suse + a portage a like. Stuff compiled using portage can go to /usr/local, the rest is in the main /usr tree. Stability for the bulk with the flexibility you need without going trawling freshmeat/google for the program.
God damn, I've gone way off topic. I'll stop now.