Re: [PLUG] Sorcerer GNU/Linux

[Paul.L.Snyder@gsk.com]

On 22-Jan-2002, Tobias DiPasquale <anany@ece.villanova.edu> wrote:
>On Mon, 2002-01-21 at 22:21, Bill Jonas wrote:
>> I was catching up on Slashdot, and a new distribution caught my eye:
>> Sorcerer GNU/Linux.  There was a review of it on DistroWatch.  It seems
>> like a hybrid of Linux From Scratch, Debian, and *BSD.  Very neat!  I
>> intend to try it when I have some free time.
>>
>> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/18/1319242
>>
>> --
>> Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
[...]
>
>Gentoo Linux seems to be of the same vain, and I am installing that
>today. I'll let you all know how it goes :)
>
>--
><< T o b i a s   D i P a s q u a l e >>
[...]

I'm running Gentoo on one of my workstations, and it is definitely
interesting.  Currently, the box is chugging away on an 'emerge update
--world', at the end of which I'll have a shiny, new, optimized
2.4.18-pre3-mjc-XFS kernel and XFree86 4.2.0.  I was originally attracted
to Gentoo by its ports system (called 'portage'), and wanted to play around
with it.  There are some clever bits where you can globally select if, say,
you want optional Gnome support compiled into applications that support it,
or SSL, or readline, and so forth.  Updates do take longer than simply
slapping down binary packages, of course, as you have to wait for
everything to compile (just passed 2h30 elapsed on this update, and still
counting [using a Pentium III-550 on a fast pipe]).

So far, I've learned that I would not want to attempt to install gentoo
over a dial-up connection (though it's not excessively more painful than an
internet install of debian, in this respect - it could be done with
patience and an understanding ISP).  I've also discovered that the
compilation/installation script (.ebuild, in gentoo-think) for zsh is
malignantly broken, and I've been trying to coax it into sanely installing
the completion functions.  Other than that, what I've seen of the distro is
quite sharp, and I'll be delving further (sounds like it might make a good
PLUG talk, eh?)

I'd be very interested in hearing anyone's experiences with Sorcerer.  I
weighed it against Gentoo, but wasn't as impressed with the technical bits
I read in the documentation.  Also, it looks like Sorcerer is still using
LILO - I don't wanna go back!  Grub is my friend, especially when I'm
dual-booting.  On the nifty side, Sorcerer does provide staightforward
instructions on setting up an encrypted loopback filesystem.

Gentoo Linux:
http://www.gentoo.org

Patches incorporated in the current default gentoo kernel:
http://lists.gentoo.org/pipermail/gentoo-dev/2002-January/009279.html

Sorcerer GNU Linux:
http://sorcerer.wox.org/

pls


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