Re: Rock Linux 2.0 released

Re: Rock Linux 2.0 released

Posted Mar 11, 2004 12:39 UTC (Thu) by alanjwylie (subscriber, #4794)
In reply to: Rock Linux 2.0 released by crankysysadmin
Parent article: Rock Linux 2.0 released

Pardon my ignorance, but how does Rock Linux:

1) differ from Gentoo?

It's similar, but was started much earlier -
Rock - started 1997, rel 1.0 in 1999
Gentoo - started in 1999, rel 1.0 in 2002

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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