[Preston] Some basic Linux questions

[Guy Heatley]

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On Tuesday 07 January 2003 3:30 pm, you wrote:

I have chosen to answer Q4.
:-)

> 4. What makes the diffrences in all the other distro's

Good question. 
Because the Linux kernel and Gnu programs are open-source in theory any 
person or group can release their own distro. YOU can if you want!

In practice, all the different flavours have a different skew on things like 
package management, security, stability of included software, the 
cutting-edge status of included software, ease of installation, flexibility 
of installation and how 'free' the software is. (And more factors besides.)

I think it is fair to say that most people in PLUG use a distro based on 
Red-Hat (e.g. Mandrake, Suse) which will install software via some kind of 
rpm.

Others exist: I use Debian, there are Slackware users and Gentoo users here. 
Linux-from-scratch is built via an existing Linux system purely from 
compiling source code.

When you install a binary (rpm, deb etc) somebody somewhere has compiled it 
for you on a particular machine with a particular processor. Machine code can 
be optimised for a particular achitecture (there are new machine code 
instructions on newer processors) and if you compile you own programs from 
source it will be optimised for your machine rather than a generic IBM PC. 
This is why people bother to do this. (This overlaps into one of your other 
questions.)

Hope this makes things clearer.

- -- 
Guy

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