After a couple weeks of being away without explaination, the Radix Point is back. If you had been keeping up with my blog in the past you would have noticed that near the end of the first posting period, most of my posts were just about weird Gentoo bugs and about how much work I had to do to fix them. Well I randomly decided that I’d had enough and that I wanted to move to a new distro. I formatted my hdd (and forgot to backup my old blog database) and tested out three different distros as potential replacements for Gentoo:
- Foresight Linux – A great GNOME-centric distro based off of rpath. It uses conary as the package management system which worked a lot like apt-get but with some pretty good source building tools taken almost directly from Gentoo’s portage. The Foresight guys are also working on a web-based system management suite called OverSite. It could also manage multiple systems at the same time. All-in-all Foresight was a great distro but it was almost too beta-ish to be using as an every day desktop. Also I’m not too big a fan of web-based applications anyway.
- Ubuntu – Everyone knows about Ubuntu and how it works but I decided it wasn’t for me for a few reasons. One was that I really can’t stand binary focused distros because I feel like I end up installing way more than I could ever want. Ubuntu is a bit better than Debian because their repositories are more focused. Also, I had a hell of a time switching over to ALSA and getting MP3 playing to work. Something that did work great right of the bat was printing though. That was a great surprise because printing is usually something that takes me a while to get working (if ever).
- CRUX – They lable themselves as a “lightweight, i686-optimized Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users” which I found to be taken to the extreme. Everything from the net scripts to the init system were designed from a minimalistic approach and almost everything is configured right in the bash scripts. It makes troubleshooting a dream! Also the ports system is very simple and clean. You end up having to calculate most dependancies yourself but its worth it because of the fast compile times. Compiles take a fraction of the time they would take in Gentoo for some reason. I’m assuming they’ve highly configured gcc or something. The developers are great as well. Instead of having a centralized repo like portage; with CRUX you pick and choose which repo’s you want to use and each one has the maintainers personality and taste. It’s a very personal distro and I feel I’ve really found a home with it. I never thought after three-plus years of Gentoo that I’d ever be able to be so comfortable with another distro so quickly. People like to say that CRUX is a lot like Net-BSD which really made me consider trying BSD for the first time ever.
Some other things I love about CRUX is that all of the cutting edge Mono projects are fully supported (like Beagle and Muine). As a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with cool new Gnome apps like that and thinking a lot about what kind of project I could do in C# and use cool tools like inotify. My mind usually gravitates towards the iPod. Since the iPL project has now moved to MPD, there are now some iPL specific standars that I can follow to develop and iTunes-like app for iPL iPods. I’ve taken two days off in a row from work this week so hopefully I will have time to get started then.
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