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I was reading about this distro yesterday, sound
very nice....has anyone else used
it?
Dave
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2002 1:35
PM
Subject: Sorcerers magic
Just a note to those that might be interested in a different
distro.
Sorcerer is one of a few distros that do not distrbute binaries,
the
whole install process and package management is done from
source.
Questions are asked about your system (processor etc) and you get
to
configure your kernel from scratch. Therefore you get a kernel with
your
configuration choices, and both the kernel and userland apps
are
compiled with all the optimisations for your processor.
By
contrast most popular distros compile for i386 only (SuSE is i486 I
think,
and mandrake is i586.) That leaves out i686 and athlon users.
Now there
is an awful lot of downloading here, as the system downloads
the latest
sources, so it pays to have something faster than 56k. Mine
did alright on
jetstart (128k). I was compiling on an athlon 1133MHz
with 512M Ram.
Downloading continues in the background while compiling
in the foreground
(ie package z will download while y is still compiling)
At times the
compiling caught up with the downloading, but usually there
was a pile of
packages waiting to be compiled when the previous one
finished.
All
in I seem to have ended up with a seemingly fast machine, although
there
are yet minimal services running (because it only installs what
you ask
for) so it is a little difficult to compare with something more
bloated and
general like mandrake/redhat. Also I am sure that my kernel
is not optimal
- I tended to compile in anything that looked vaguely
like i might need it
rather than risk something that would not work.
The great thing is that
I was able to ssh into it thru my firewall from
work yesterday and do an
update/rebuild remotely (update downloads the
latest package list, rebuild
rebuilds everything on the system). I got
to watch the compiler zoom
thru its stuff, recompiling everything from
the kernel to kde.
You
always have the latest packages (kernel 2.4.17, XFree 4.2, KDE 2.2.2
etc
etc).
The whole thing uses the analogy of magical spells. A package is
a "spell"
and all the spells are found in the "grimoire". To install a new
package
you "cast" a spell, e.g "cast postfix" - easy as that. To find a
spell
you gaze into the grimoire e.g. "gaze search ssh". The spell analogy
is all
a bit twee, but dammit it works!
You can have meta-spells
like kde which gives you all the usual kde sub
packages like kdelibs,
kdemultimedia etc. (A meta-spell really just
lists all the sub-packages as
dependencies). A recommended starting
spell is called "really useful" and
it downloads a number of - well
-really useful packages to get you started
(mail server, ssh, various
others).
If you are interested take a
look at http://sorcerer.wox.org.
Review at http://www.distrowatch.com/sorcerer.php.
There are a few
others about if you search on google.
Also there is
a similar distro called gentoo at http://www.gentoo.org
--
Nick Rout
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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