Warp wrote:

>   That was actually an interesting read. With so many distros it's very
> hard to follow what their differences and design principles are. That's
> a superb summary of them.

Indeed. And, more importantly, which ones are worth researching and 
which ones aren't. (There seem to be millions of tiny one-man distros 
these days.)

>   It also clarified for me where some of the common misconceptions about
> Linux are coming from. For example:
> 
>   "In Linux when you want to configure anything you have to edit obscure
> files in obscure system directories using a text editor."
> 
>   That's quite clearly based on the design philosophy of Slackware.

Well... it's kind of the "Unix philosophy". Everything is configured by 
text files. That means that you can run tools like sed and grep over 
them... and, yes, build GUIs to do the work for you.

The Amiga, by constrast, used binary files for almost everything. But 
even so, overwriting a config file instantly changed the way the OS 
acts. E.g., copying a prefs file from disk to the prefs folder would 
instantly change all your screen colours.

And Windows, by constrast again, uses "the registry".

All valid solutions, just all different.

>   "When you want to install new software, you have to always compile it
> from sources."
> 
>   This is obviously based on the design of Gentoo, where indeed the entire
> software management (and the even the installation of the OS itself) is
> based on source code packages which are compiled for the computer in
> question (the basic idea being that when the software is compiled for
> that computer, it's more optimized specifically for it).
>   Also this is nowadays a design feature almost exclusive to Gentoo, and
> quickly losing popularity (because the advantage of a per-computer based
> optimized compilation gives nowadays less and less speed benefits over
> more generic binary distributions).

Setting up Gentoo and watching it compile stuff was interesting. After a 
while, I began to delude myself that I was "learning" about how large 
software works and what the build process is.

Having just recompiled GHC, I think I'm secumbing to the same delusion...

PS. What the hell is it with Linux and "commands" that fill three 
screenfulls of a terminal console?! What's that about?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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