Celestia Forums

There's a Windows prerelease, is there a Linux one?

Thanks

alien wrote:There's a Windows prerelease, is there a Linux one?

Thanks

Yes any time: download the sources from CVS and compile them. In Linux the compiler is a native part of the installation and in former times UNIX and specifically Linux was exclusively distributed through source tar balls...

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:Yes any time: download the sources from CVS and compile them. In Linux the compiler is a native part of the installation and in former times UNIX and specifically Linux was exclusively distributed through source tar balls...

And the source based distribution are making a come-back!

There still is the autotools-hell problem though... I guess I should fix my tarball generation script. It's been broken since July...

Christophe wrote:

t00fri wrote:Yes any time: download the sources from CVS and compile them. In Linux the compiler is a native part of the installation and in former times UNIX and specifically Linux was exclusively distributed through source tar balls...

And the source based distribution are making a come-back!

There still is the autotools-hell problem though... I guess I should fix my tarball generation script. It's been broken since July...

Hi Christophe,

so did you spend the last two weeks compiling ?

But seriously, I have great sympathies with this traditional approach, except I don't have enough time anymore. For many years, as I have told you earlier, I assembled my own Linux installation by compiling (and patching) packages and systems routines to fit. It is enormously time consuming but unbeatably stable.

Bye Fridger

t00fri wrote:so did you spend the last two weeks compiling ;-)?

Actually it takes remarkably little time to compile. The base system (with X) takes about 2 hours on a decent enough machine (Pentium 4). The full system about 12 hours.

There is this nufty utility called genlop which can show you how long each package compilation took. For example for Xorg:



Which just shows the quick pace of X.org's X server development.

All in all, I'm quite happy with Gentoo up to now: stable, easily and thoroughly customizable and a breaze to keep up to date.

Christophe wrote:

t00fri wrote:so did you spend the last two weeks compiling ?

Actually it takes remarkably little time to compile. The base system (with X) takes about 2 hours on a decent enough machine (Pentium 4). The full system about 12 hours.

There is this nufty utility called genlop which can show you how long each package compilation took. For example for Xorg:

Code: Select all

# genlop -t xorg-x11
 * x11-base/xorg-x11

     Fri Sep  3 00:29:54 2004 >>> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.7.0-r1
       merge time: 52 minutes and 31 seconds.

     Sat Sep  4 21:28:28 2004 >>> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.7.0-r2
       merge time: 57 minutes and 36 seconds.

     Thu Sep  9 18:41:20 2004 >>> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.0
       merge time: 1 hour, 2 minutes and 34 seconds.

     Wed Oct 13 21:14:40 2004 >>> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.0-r1
       merge time: 51 minutes and 33 seconds.

     Thu Nov 25 19:25:37 2004 >>> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.0-r3
       merge time: 47 minutes and 32 seconds.

     Wed Jan  5 02:57:29 2005 >>> x11-base/xorg-x11-6.8.1.901
       merge time: 52 minutes and 29 seconds.


Which just shows the quick pace of X.org's X server development.

All in all, I'm quite happy with Gentoo up to now: stable, easily and thoroughly customizable and a breaze to keep up to date.

Christophe,

I am curious to learn more about your experiences after all this frustration with the "patch magicians" SuSE & Co for a decade or so. After they have been bought by NOVELL things get even worse.

How about patches with Gentoo? Do they use vanilla kernels?

Bye Fridger

As usual with gentoo you have several options available. They provide a default patched kernel geared towards desktop usage, another one is geared towards servers (hardened kernel) and you can also get the vanilla kernel.

You can configure your kernel manualy or use a tool which will build the kind of kernel you usualy get on other distribution (hardware detection done at boot time).

See http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-kernel.xml

You can also either use udev or devfs.

Christophe wrote:I guess I should fix my tarball generation script. It's been broken since July...

It's back up:
http://celestia.teyssier.org/download/daily/

It probably won't be run daily though, more likely weekly.