> On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 03:57:46PM +0800, Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla wrote: > > > > Well, this is true, but of course Slackware makes doing the things he's > > said a lot easier. A modern distribution like Red Hat 7.x is next to > > impossible to install minimalistically on a machine with less than 1G of > > hard disk space, many thanks to the bizarre dependencies of many of the > > packages. > > The RULE (Run Up2date Linux Everywhere) project is under > development to address the problem of minimal install with > RedHat. But, yes, Slackware's still easier. > > http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/rule/ > > -Benj
>From the url you gave: "Modify the current Red Hat Linux installer so that it runs in less than 32 MB of RAM, or create a new one if needed." Woah... that bloated huh? Anyway, pleasant (on the surface) experiences with it notwithstanding, I can't help but have the niggling feeling that Red Hat is the MS of the Linux world. I always thought 'luser'-oriented commercial Linux distros like it, with all their lame tools (like rpm), violated the tenets of Linux minimalism by saddling it with so much bloat and 'user-friendly' layers that it starts to become as unreliable and bug-ridden as Windoze. On the other hand, it seems that that is the key to mass acceptance - I know of users who rave about how they found Red Hat easier to install than NT. Now if only the marketing can catch up with MS... Btw, has anyone here ever tried Gentoo (http://www.gentoo.org)? I think it should appeal to Slackware fans. Thinking about distros can't help but bring me to the topic of fragmentation... While there is something to be said about variety, I find it pretty sad how, with the exception of the kernel where strength seems to be bred through it, the other portions of the Linux scene is such a fragmented mess with no strong unifying direction. Kind of ironic that something which triggered a rennaisance of *-nix now seems to be headed towards the same pitfall of fragmentation. Aside from distro tool and directory structure concerns, probably the worst example of fragmentation of efforts is with low-level gfx and audio access. For sound, you've got OpenAL, ALSA, plus a couple other efforts. For gfx, the landscape is littered with half finished projects - GGI (floundering), DirectFB (still has to catch up with DirectX 3... snicker...), DRI (floundering too :-( ), and a couple other relatively unknown direct framebuffer projects, etc... libSDL is the one rose among the thorns and is *one heroic effort*. But it has to sit atop X right now, and that means performance is not as supercharged as it could be. Things I'm wondering about: 1) Is there a defacto sound standard for linux? What is the most mature one? 2) How are OpenGL drivers performance for the most popular cards are under Linux? Is it competitive with Windows (probably not if you have to run everything via X without DRI)? DirectGraphics, while it still has its flaws, is already ahead of OpenGL in consistent support of the latest 3D hardware features and its ease of use is now almost or at par with the latter. And a couple more thoughts re the desktop scene, MS Windoze/.NET vs Linux, champion of the free software world: Gtk v2.0 and Qt widgets are only a bit behind the latest shiny Win32 widgets, but with GDI+, MS leapfrogs a whole generation ahead again (http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/video/GDInext.htm). The driver architecture for GDI+ is definitely next-generation. The concerns that SMA addresses seems to be nowhere in the sights of those doing Linux gfx drivers. As for resolution independent aspects of GDI+ itself though, Berlin (www.berlin-consortium.org) may provide an answer in the hopefully not-too-distant future. With .NET's Windows Forms, FINALLY, an easy-to-use OOP framework (ala Delphi and Swing, NOT horrible MFC) with which to write GUI apps with(*)! Java's Swing (wonder how mature Eclipse is...) has to be the closest competitor, but I've heard its performance under X is even worse than under Win32. (*) I do believe that Qt has had such an app framework for some time now, except you have to use it with an unmanaged language (i.e. C++) - no longer a wise idea in this day and age. 'Nother thing I'm curious about: Is there an equivalent OOP framework for Gtk or do you still have to do everything as C function calls? _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
