[rescue] Linux Luserisms (was: secondary market storage?)

[Nathaniel Grady]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 08:53:06PM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 07:57:44PM -0500, Linc Fessenden wrote:
> > Here we go again with more poorly informed people who think RedHat is the
> > only and defacto Linux distro out there.  As far as the Linux is not Unix
> > argument...  Who gives a flying crap?  If it walks like a duck and talks
> > like a duck, it's a duck.  Doesn't matter what you call that duck, it's
> > still a duck.  You people get way to hung up on semantics.
> 
> Personally, I'm looking for a good distro where I can get a base 
> environment and compiler on, then build EVERYTHING ELSE from scratch.
> X, utilities, everything.

Try Gentoo. Just 1.0'd a few days ago. http://www.gentoo.org The install cd is just a barebones system with barley enough to bootstrap from source, it automagically builds the base system for you from scratch using a bsd ports-like system they call portage (which i actually find superior to the BSD ports system for most things). If you want stuff beyond gcc and bash you can install them all from the portage system. Like with xBSD you can specify your compiler flags in the make.conf, and unlike BSD you can set a "USE" variable that says what sorts of optional stuff you want (such as X, alsa or oss, etc...) and the ebuilds will adopt their dependencies to match... Oh, and when you build the base system there's one file that has the list of packages needed for the base system so if you really want to use gcc-3.0 instead of 2.95 or you want an older glibc for some bizarre reason you're welcome to change it (after pulling the old portage ebuild file from cvs...). Oh, and you gotta love having a sysVr4 init style "env.d" system for the system-wide profile, and init scripts that can automagically figure out what order they need to run in using the dependancy info at the top of the file (and gotta hate the second it adds to your boot...)! 

After getting fed up with mandrake / r00that / etc, and switching to Free/Open/NetBSD and Solaris (depending on the system) someone convinced me to try Gentoo and I have to say Linux doesn't actually suck! 'specially with xfs (or reiser or linux-journaling-filesystem-of-the-day) and lowlatency patches... 

just my $0.02

--Nathaniel Grady