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Rock Linux 2.0 releasedRock Linux 2.0 releasedPosted Mar 10, 2004 15:06 UTC (Wed) by alanjwylie (subscriber, #4794)Parent article: Rock Linux 2.0 released The comments about package formats are totally missing the point. What sets Rock apart from the likes of Debian and Red Hat is this it is not itself a distribution, but a Distribution Build Kit. In picking that one particular sentence out of the press release I'm afraid that the editors of LWN failed to grasp the concept of Rock. Rock is a toolkit that allows anyone to create their own customised Linux distribution by compiling from minimally patched sources. You can select the packages that you want, ranging between a stripped down LAMP server and a full Gnome and KDE desktop. You can select the processor type you want to optimise for, and you can even do a cross-compile between architectures. You can choose Sparc, or a generic I386, or optimise for an Athlon-XP, amongst many others. Have a look at The Linux Video Project for an example of what you can do with Rock.
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Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 11, 2004 11:42 UTC (Thu) by crankysysadmin (guest, #19449) [Link] Pardon my ignorance, but how does Rock Linux:1) differ from Gentoo? 2) prevent you from having to package things? Regardless of how flexible Rock is, the moment it creates its own packaging system it is going to receive flak from the community (rightly or wrongly), and in that sense the package format discussion is not beside the point. In my humble opinion, the proliferation of Linux distros (and meta-distros and what have you: sorry, but Gentoo and Rock seem to me not essentially different from a regular old distro: you have your own sources, you have your own build process, etc.) is good in the short term, but eventually survival of the fittest is going to need to come into play. That SuSE and RedHat are currently "fittest" is solely a question of marketing "user-friendliness", but IMHO at the expense of reliability & simplicity (try messing with SuSE init scripts sometime! YAST --> SuSEConfig --> chkconfig --> insserv). I love Debian above all but it's not super-user-friendly. Gentoo is only interesting for people with fast machines IMHO (unless you have three weeks for every upgrade of glibc and binutils). So I'm all for continued proliferation of distros. But perhaps someone could adapt a package system like apt to regard the distro as a dependency, and then we could keep the same package system instead of creating a new one for each new distro.
Re: Rock Linux 2.0 released Posted Mar 11, 2004 12:39 UTC (Thu) by alanjwylie (subscriber, #4794) [Link] Pardon my ignorance, but how does Rock Linux:
It's similar, but was started much earlier -
2) prevent you from having to package things? Rock is a source based distribution build kit - Packages are just a convenient way of transferring object files from one Rock based machine to another. In 5 or 6 years of using Rock, I have never created a "package", other than during the creation of a boot and install CD.
That SuSE and RedHat are currently "fittest" is solely a question of marketing "user-friendliness", but IMHO at the expense of reliability & simplicity (try messing with SuSE init scripts sometime! YAST --> SuSEConfig --> chkconfig --> insserv). I love Debian above all but it's not super-user-friendly. Rock has specifically avoided "user friendliness". It does minimal patching of the original sources, and mostly uses the package's standard configuration, which you edit with a text editor. Scripts and configuration files are kept to a minimum, and are as simple as possible. Rock is designed for the experienced system administrator who doesn't want a distributor inserting superfluous layers beween them and the system. If your preferred method of configuring your systems is using "vi" over an ssh connection, then Rock might be the distribution for you.
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