From: Trans Date: 2007-09-11T02:40:04+09:00 Subject: Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails On Sep 10, 9:46 am, Chad Perrin wrote: > On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 12:07:42PM +0900, Trans wrote: > > On Sep 9, 6:54 pm, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" wrote: > > > > The bridge you have to cross (eventually) is whether you ever want to do > > > kernel builds or recompile packages from source. RHEL and its rebuilds > > > actively *discourage* rebuilding the kernel. It's too easy to trash your > > > system that way. But rebuilding packages from source is easy on all the > > > major distros. > > > > Or you could use Gentoo, where you *have* to recompile everything from > > > source. :) > > > Ah, come on! SourceMage or Lunar is where the real source code action > > is at ;) > > No . . . the "real source code action" would be in a BSD Unix (FreeBSD, > NetBSD, OpenBSD), not any Linux distribution. You can also get good > package-based software management, at least with FreeBSD and NetBSD (I'm > not familiar enough with OpenBSD to comment on it in this respect), if > you want that too. Back when I was a Debianista, my response to any > recommendation to give Gentoo a try was "If I wanted to use Gentoo, I'd > use FreeBSD instead." Now, I use FreeBSD. I never quite understood the BSD fanfare. Is it really that much different from Linux? My attempts at installation left me disappointed. Obviously that has nothing to do with the core OS, but nonetheless, from an end-user perspective I just didn't see any offsetting benefit. To me you can pretty much lump them all together as "unix". > As for whether SourceMage or Lunar is a better source-based Linux > distribution than Gentoo -- well, I'm highly skeptical of such a claim, > but I don't have the experience with them to argue one way or the other. Well, I was just being funny. As for which source-based distro is better, they are all very much alike really (after all you're compiling form source), but Gentoo has much better docs and a bigger community, so it mostly "wins" for that reason alone. Of course, real source code action would be LFS --which is an interesting exercise (I've done it), but a hell of a lot of work. T.