Slashdot Mirror
Toward a New Kind of Linux Distribution
An anonymous reader writes "Progeny co-founder Ian Murdock wrote a weblog entry that has been reprinted at Newsforge. He talks about how current distros are built from the top down, making a 'one-size-fits-all' solution of technology. He proposes making a modular solution that encompasses building modules so distros can include only the technology they need to suit their purpose, kinda like building from the bottom up. Interesting read, good arguments, potential for a new Linux community."
Progeny co-founder Ian Murdock wrote
Wouldn't it be worth mentioning that he is founder of Debian as well?
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
They started by making products designed for single roles, with a database server, a groupware and messaging server, and a fileserver.
Modularity is great for large organizations, but at this point it would be foolish to fall into MS's line of thinking, that you need a separate server for each role in the industry. It would behoove us to try harder to break down the barriers between servers so that they can act in a cohesive, stable and seamless fashion, whether there is one server, five servers, or five thousand servers.
And that's why we need a stronger LVM!
Interesting. I'd always felt that this is how Linux really works the best., rather than being a giant 1 gig hunk of software, I can pick and choose the parts I want to play with. This leads to lots of mistakes early on, but over time, you learn how to optimize and reevaluate what you need and where, with the end result of understanding your system that much better. So my question is: Was this a suggestion for Linux in general, or a suggestion for a new type of business model?
His idea sounds very close to Morphix. It allows easy building of customized live-cd distributions. It supplies its own installer too.
Never mind that Ian Murdock is also a founder of Debian, and that Progeny has always been built on Debian; what objective reason is there for building this kind of OS on Gentoo rather than Debian?
First of all, Debian is quite modular and simple. In fact, Lindows uses it behind their "click 'n' run" front end, and its supposed to be amazingly smooth. Debian can be used for more finely grained options, but can also be used for a modular system as described Murdock.
Plus, lets be honest; source distributions just aren't going to cut it in an environment where package installation speed is important.
There is mkcd, which allows you to create custom Mandrake CDs with the software and options you want.
And mandrake has a customizable auto bootup/install via drakx (mdk's installer system).
Add all of the above, and a little knowledge about SRPMS (if you want true customization), and it works rather well. Also Mandrake's public download edition is 100% FLOSS, so there are no issues about redistributing the software (unless *you* add some non-FLOSS stuff on your own, heh)
Sunny Dubey
The point of Gentoo is that using the source for installation allows much finer grained dependency resolution.
For example, take vim. Depending on what you have installed, it may or may not have Perl integration, Python integration, an X UI, ctags support, make or ANT integration, and so on.
A binary distribution needs to provide a different binary for every possible combination of those, if it's going to allow fine-grained choice around what the Linux system has installed. Either that, or you have to turn off a lot of functionality which could be turned on, in case the dependencies aren't installed.
With Gentoo, the binary's dependencies are determined at install time, so you can have a single package which supports all the possible combinations of other components the user might have chosen to install. If I have Perl but no Python dev tools and opted not to have Python integration, no problem, vim is built appropriately from the same package everyone else is using.
In practice, the binary distributions seem to provide only two versions of vim, a "minimal" terminal-only one, and an "everything, including X" version. Personally, I don't want either of those--I want most things, excluding Python and X. Gentoo lets me have that, Debian doesn't because it doesn't have a vim-perl-ant-make-nox-nopython package.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Nice link, I especially found the quote Can you conclude that "Gentoo is faster than Mandrake?" No. This is a limited test. It is likely that Mandrake is faster for some things. Also, we tested load-time performance only to be informative.