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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."
but wouldn't something like this be better based on Gentoo? If it's going to be modular and simple to use for the majority I think it'd be better off with package management more along the gentoo line, instead of debian, which while good is more suited to hackish, more finely grained options?
This seems like a pretty good idea, I am sure that many people would adopt it. However, it sounds an awful lot like Linux From Scratch, or Gentoo. I'm assuming that a distribution like the one proposed must be a binary one to appeal to the masses.Overall, though, this sounds like a good way to attract more people to the Linux community.
What I don't get is how this is different from, say, Debian or Gentoo at all. At the end of his blog he says "If this sounds a lot like Debian, that's because it is in many ways", goes on to list the ways, and then doesn't list any differences other than an Anaconda installer. So, is this debian that installs like redhat and lets you choose packages? I mean, it doesn't sound like there's anything new here at all.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
Sounds like a great idea - but surely that's what you get from the gentoo linux system - you custom build a verison of linux that not only has 'just the components you need' in it, but also is (or can be) specifically tailored to suit your hardware and peripherals etc. I can see an avenue for component based distributions taking off, however. The two challenges with Gentoo are 1) the need to compile everything from scratch (which can take ages) and 2) the almost vertical learning curve required to get the resulting linux system to work (work out of the box? - not really!). Presumably the component model might allow both of these to be addressed...
Morphix is modular, and can be adapted with less effort
The base, the Knoppix part contains the kernel, kernel modules, hardware detection, etc. This base is left untouched. You can either a change a mainmod or add lots of minimodules.
The are four basic images to start off with. So making you own LiveCD is much easier.
It even possible to save you files, configuration and setting to the Morphix CD you using, ready for next boot up.
Did I mention the GUI installer ...
Brendan Mentioned before and here
He says a basical iso is avaible and "More components and a component-aware, Anaconda-based installation mechanism will be added in the coming weeks".
Heh, compiling everything for oneself through an intuitive gui sounds pretty cool to me !
Gentoo now accessible to the unwashed masses (which I'm part of), Yay !
I think it would be good from a security stand point to be able to quickly build the most minimal system, but there is still probably a lot of stuff in the Kernel that isn't needed. Still it would be great to have a tool that was based on the reserve of package dependency and removed everything you didn't want/need.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Wouldn't it be neat if you could go to a website, enter in a list of all the hardware on your computer, enter in the applications or types of applications you want to use, and then download a customized installation CD with only what you want included? Then if you changed any hardware or wanted more software, you'd revisit the site, enter in the changes, and then download a patch including required modules, applications, and a script that installed/configured the changes?
That would be cool.
... is, in my opinion, one of the more interesting Linux distro's around right now.
...
Its not so much a distro, as a 'meta-build system', for building and packaging your own distro.
To me, this is the best solution, and while these sorts of build-system efforts are still in their infancy, I can see a day when you just answer a few questions, press a button, and get a custom CD designed -exclusively- for the application you've defined.
That's pretty nice. As a Linux user since the minix post, I'm excited about more and more of these sorts of 'smart build environments' becoming the 'distro construction set' de jour
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Would be a program that would generate a Linux distribution based on your desires.
It would be a wizard that would ask you questions about what you want. For example, do you want a server or a desktop distro, do you want KDE or Gnome, do you want office software, games, web browsers.
After you answer all the Questions it would make you give it a Name, Such as MooKore Linux, and it would genreate an ISO filled with the RPMs for you for you to install.
found here
Wow - he managed to write 600 words without really explaining what he wants to do.
Is he just saying that distributions should go for niche markets by allowing greater customisation? So instead of installing everything of the 3 CDs you only install what you want? Kind of like every other distro?
Or is it more than that? Some kind of pluggable component system akin to Debian's virtual package "provides" system? So you can have different packages that provide standard services (mail, desktop, web-serving etc.) through common interfaces to the other components.
Isn't this really more along teh lines of marketing hype then it is general user useful?
Come on now, we no longer have sub 50Mhz CPUs (but many times that and getting faster),all the expensive backup media we used to use has been replaced with CD/DVD writers (and that's only going to improve), general storage/access media (hard drives) are far more massive in storage space than the old 120Meg drives and and even far more inexpensive (the larger the drive the cheaper per Meg you pay)....ETC...
And HEY, we can even use more ram bits for dates, avoiding things like Y2K... Or is not gigs of ram not enough?
Is it really a value to have injected additional parts complexity to have to deal with?
What is the trade off? You use up a little less drive space, maybe make a fraction better use of your CPU, use a little less ram space and backup media....in exchange for....
Additional complexity to allow you to screw things up more often...
Hell, just wait 6-18 months and get a new faster, larger storage, more ranm, etc... system.... The cost difference will be less than what you might spend in maintaining componentalized linux.
Hell, I really like the Live CD concept, where it determines what hardware you have and auto-configures.....but all from a standard full package.
The problem we have here is that linux is designed for linux users. Like myself, I prefer gentoo. It fits my person style and I just love emerge-ing all kinds of junk and making my own kernel.
I would like to see a linux distribution the exact opposite. One that I could give to people fed up with windows. It should detect all the hardware like knoppix. Then it will bring up a simple GUI style disk formatting tool, like the mandrake installer. Then after I select which partitions it should just install, no more questions asked. When its done all the hardware should be working. One of every necessary software application should be installed. The gui will be simply laid out with big pretty buttons. One that says Web Browser, another for Word Processor, etc. Wine, lilo and other things will be configured perfectly and automatically without user input. There will also be another big button that says "install software". It will have a big nice easy to use app that sorts softwares by categories, shows screenshots and readable descriptions of different programs. With a single click these programs will be installed and new icons will be created. With another click these programs should also be automatically updated to the newer versions without breaking anything. And of course easy uninstallation is a must too.
I see no reason why this isn't possible. Why hasn't anyone (that I know of) done it yet?
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There are thousands of fanboys waking up (or getting ready for bed :P) across America right now that are reading this, and all of them are thinking, "Well, this or that distro already does it!" You've all missed the point.
:P) Seriously, though. Linux is linux; let's not make a fuss. It's just nice to see a movement away from the techniques of the past - RPM, in particular, which doesn't make custom rollouts terribly easy.
Has it occured to you that his writing isn't directed towards those of us that already use Linux? Could it be that the founder of Debian would possibly want to make a little money on his toils and ventures by selling his ideas to Suits and PHBs?
No, that couldn't be. Could it?
Yes. (And no, I'm not saying this is a bad thing.)
Stop thinking the world revolves around you (us) and your (our) zealotrous love of your distro. (Particularly you gentoovian freaks with your distcc clusters!
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That Linux distros are taking the shotgun marketing approach, unlike Microsoft who has painstakingly researched what end users want in an Operating System and for the most part, has delivered exactly what the majority of PC users want. Granted, Linux is destined for the server market for the time being so a distro packed with services is appropriate for the most part, but if Linux ever wants any substantial share of the desktop commodity its going to need to do some serious work on several fronts like UI, ease of use, intuitiveness, size and speed.
End of Line.
I maintain 3 Gentoo servers (1 of them LTSP, the other two file/print/web) One of the servers has 4 gentoo desktop machines connected to it. I have a portage/distfiles NFS share, I use distcc and I find it really, really low maintenance. My desktops have kde 3.2, publishing stuff, OO, while the servers have Apache, Qmail, etc. Very different installs, all managed the same way. After 4-5 years of Redhat the /etc folder was still very mysterious to me. After 4-5 months of Gentoo everything began to make sense. I switched to Gentoo some time around Redhat 8.0 (can't remember exactly, but my machines were running 7.x when I swapped 'em). Never had a problem.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
It's monolithic nature has been one of my major gripes with Linux. This is most apparent in the kernel itself; the sources are distributed in one big (and I mean BIG) tarball containing sources for nigh on every architecture and every device supported. Then when you configure the beast, many options cannot be built as modules, so it's either bloat your kernel or miss out.
The same is true for many distributions. Although a lot of software comes in packages, installations tend to range from quite heavy to almost ridiculous (about 1 GB). And the kernel, again, tends to be a fairly monolithic one, supporting a few filesystems that are unlikely to all be used, etc.
I have to say that Debian tends to be quite OK. The base install is, what? 100 MB? And to that you can just add what you need, dependencies solved for you and all. The kernels you apt-get are usually modular (although the generated ramdisks haven't always worked for me, and cannot be edited due to their being in cramfs). Still, it's annoying that when I want a feature added to my kernel, I have to reconfigure, recompile (I don't' keep the object filesaround - they take too much space), reinstall, and reboot. Sure, I could get a faster computer and a bigger hard drive, but even then, having plenty of something is no excuse to waste it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
First of all, a well designed application shouldn't have that kind of conditional compile time dependancies. It's possible to do that all at runtime.
Secondly, debian supports building from source right in the debian package system. It's not possible yet to build the entire distribution (due to incomplete and circular build dependancies), but when you've installed a base platform, it's quite easy to rebuild the stuff you need with whatever optimizations you prefer, all while still making it easy to do binary only installs.
Admitted, that last bit of functionality didn't really take off until gentoo led the way, but I remember compiling my own optimised debian packages in the previous century, so...
I'll admit that my knowledge of processor architecture is quite limited, but it seems to me that inlining functions would prevent cache misses since you're just running a long sequential block of code instead of jumping around to run code from different parts of memory.
Alphanos
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.
There are thousands of apache modules out there, but I can get pretty much any combination of them without recompiling. What you're talking about is a design flaw in vim, not a fundemental fact of computing. Look at Emacs with it's LISP based adons. No recompling needed.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
>Your "Multiplexer" is analogous to a Bittorrent tracker, basically you are trying to apply a peer to peer model to dmake or distcc.
distcc, in essence, is peer-to-peer. I'm not proposing using distcc as-is, but it's an example of the solution, and it works well for its part. Much of the complexity (scheduling, networking) is contained within that application -the only thing the multiplexer needs to do is to maintain a database of available computers.
>Even if you were to wave magically produce such software and install it on ~10000k PCs, I still don't think it would be efficient enough to work.
Have you tried compiling an application using even ten computers instead of one? Even with such small grids the speed increase is dramatic. See the distcc stats for examples of compilation speedups. Certainly, large amounts of available computers would be a great help.
> Anything the user fetchs gets precompiled in the background when the CPU is idle and saved for later.
This assumes that all compilers (or, alternatively, operating systems) are completely rebuilt so that they can work in the background -this is not something compilers are known for. And this will take probably exponential time compared to the current situation.
>Sure, it will require some extra space to store binaries that have not been installed yet, but that is trivial, especially compared to the storage, bandwidth, and complexity issues of YOUR idea.
'Some' extra storage if you precompile all the packages of your distro? You're using Slackware 2.0, right? I do conceed that some bandwith is required in my idea, but I do not understand how the storage would be an issue?
>Um, your idea is much _MUCH_ worse in this regard, but I agree it is important, which is why the GUI I propose would allow you to set all these friggin settings on a per package basis.
Okay. This is my problem (and this is what my last comment went towards): how do you set the settings in these packages? You would manually have to A) select the package and B) change the settings, then C) schedule it for precompilation. We can already do this. The only difference is that the compilation will be much slower and that you'll have a fancy GUI.
Additionally, I don't understand why my idea is bad for options. Each build will, as I wrote, send the compilation options (say, USE variables and compiler settings in Gentoo speak) along with the translation unit so that the package is compiled just as the user wanted it to be.
>The whole POINT is to make it easy for the user to compile stuff with the settings they wish.
That may be your point. My point was enabling users to easily select the compilation options they want and make compiling from source a viable option for everyone. I certainly agree that a nice GUI is an awesome thing for a package management system, but it's just that -a facade. It's not going to actually change anything.
>Try coding this beast yourself.
I would be glad to partake in such an endeavour -I'm not a kernel hacker nor a distributed computing guru, but I'm sure I could help.
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