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New Linux Distribution — Exherbo, Announced
An anonymous reader writes "Former Gentoo developer Bryan Østergaard recently announced a new linux distribution aptly named Exherbo. The distribution, which has been underway for a couple of months and is based on ideas and experiences from his long work with Gentoo, features a new packaging format and several subprojects, such as a redesigned init system. Currently no installation medium is available but their package tree is public for the daring ones who want to play with the upcoming distribution. The developers strongly discourage any serious use though, as it's still highly experimental."
I'm actually very impressed by Gentoo's new init system (baselayout-2) which was released to ~x86 not too long ago. It's so fast I'm actually considering just disabling the splash image, and it's very simple to configure (and even works with the init replacement projects like init-ng & einit). At work I'm mostly stuck with Sun's SMF (Service Management Facility) and find it too complex and inflexible. I haven't tried Apple's one, but I'm all for diversity. At the very least both Gentoo and Sun (and I'd presume Apple) can work with the legacy scripts, so if you don't like the fancy new methods feel free to stick with the old.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I have to agree with you. Way back in the day I LOVED Slackware because I understood it's init system (it was just scripts. Worked great, and I constantly was praising it compared to the more traditional SysV systems.
THEN, in college I took at Unix admin class. Having used Linux for many years, I knew a lot of what they went over already, but one thing they hit on there was the SysV init system. Once I had a human teacher actually explain the system to me and how it worked, I actually switched preferences. SysV is very quick and simple to manipulate once you get the hang of it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'll start by saying that I'm an unashamed Gentoo fanboy, so mod as appropriate, but Mr. Østergaard seems to have forgotten to mention what he dislikes about Gentoo in either his blog entry or on exherbo.org. He says that Gentoo developers, users, Fanboys, and community are bad, but the most specific technical comment he made was a criticism that someone undertook "porting ebuilds to run on SunOS 2 ksh under Cygwin", which is apparently bad. He simply says of portage that it's "broken and unmaintainable", but he doesn't say why. He says Exherbo option handeling is "much improved" compared to Gentoo's USE flags, but again doesn't say what's wrong with USE flags. (I get around unintended consequences simply by enabling/disabling things on a package-by package basis, so if he's talking about that...).
I've been using gentoo quite happily for almost 3 years now on various servers as well as desktops for multiple users (no, I don't `emerge world` nightly), so I'm quite interested in what's wrong with portage (It's a godsend from my perspective) and the rest of gentoo. Seriously, I'd really like to know what's going to bite me in the arse here. But alas, Mr. Østergaard criticisms of Gentoo were far to vague and his design goals for Exherbo were equally vague and silly. Maybe he, or someone other than than the Trolls, other distro fanboys, and non-techy former Gentoo users who got burnt and should never have used it in the first place can please point me in the direction of some unbias and fair evaluations of Gentoo's strengths and weaknesses.