[Preston] Some basic Linux questions
Guy Heatley
preston at mailman.lug.org.uk
Tue Jan 7 19:01:01 2003
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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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