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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Really understanding Linux/Unix-Derivatives Post 302452158 by Corona688 on Thursday 9th of September 2010 12:11:57 PM
Old 09-09-2010
Quote:
Originally Posted by shitson
I know of Gentoo and Slackware and the Build it yourself Linux version but i'm wondering if anyone here has an opinion about what they think if the best Operating system to fully understand the guts of the system (also being forced to learn it) by not including some temptation as package managers etc.
Building your own packages is a nice thought, but you kind of need a working system to do so. Building everything from scratch also means fixing all bugs and patching all patches by hand; it can be a problem just finding them all, let alone applying them properly.

Gentoo is closer to what you want, I think. Yes, it has a package manager, but not an intrusive one. It won't throw a fit over you using the "wrong" kernel, it checks for needed features in /proc/config.gz at runtime instead of hardcoding a dumb binary. Its build files are all shell scripts, illustrating what deviations are needed from the general "./configure ; make ; make install" procedure. Its "package database" is a sanely organized tree of files under /usr/portage, and its list of installed packages is something similar under /var/db/pkg. It needs a sane build environment of course so installs all libraries and headers, there's no clutter of "xyz-dev" packages to hunt down and pin to the board. If you want to build from hand, Gentoo's a decent place to try.

The one problem might be udev, which started as a modest device-node manager but has mushroomed into something capable of probing modules, reordering network devices, starting services, and making coffee without user intervention. If you really want to understand linux these days though there's probably no escaping it, it's quite fundamental now.

Even if you do LFS or something, Gentoo's still a convenient source of tarballs and patchsets.

Last edited by Corona688; 09-09-2010 at 01:20 PM..
 

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Linux::Distribution(3pm)				User Contributed Perl Documentation				  Linux::Distribution(3pm)

NAME
Linux::Distribution - Perl extension to detect on which Linux distribution we are running. SYNOPSIS
use Linux::Distribution qw(distribution_name distribution_version); if(my $distro = distribution_name) { my $version = distribution_version(); print "you are running $distro, version $version "; } else { print "distribution unknown "; } Or else do it OO: use Linux::Distribution qw(distribution_name distribution_version); my $linux = Linux::Distribution->new; if(my $distro = $linux->distribution_name()) { my $version = $linux->distribution_version(); print "you are running $distro, version $version "; } else { print "distribution unknown "; } DESCRIPTION
This is a simple module that tries to guess on what linux distribution we are running by looking for release's files in /etc. It now looks for 'lsb-release' first as that should be the most correct and adds ubuntu support. Secondly, it will look for the distro specific files. It currently recognizes slackware, debian, suse, fedora, redhat, turbolinux, yellowdog, knoppix, mandrake, conectiva, immunix, tinysofa, va-linux, trustix, adamantix, yoper, arch-linux, libranet, gentoo, ubuntu, scientific, oracle enterprise linux and redflag. It has function to get the version for debian, suse, fedora, redhat, gentoo, slackware, scientific, oracle enterprise linux, redflag and ubuntu(lsb). People running unsupported distro's are greatly encouraged to submit patches :-) EXPORT None by default. TODO
Add the capability of recognize the version of the distribution for all recognized distributions. AUTHORS
Alexandr Ciornii <alexchorny@gmail.com>, <http://chorny.net> Alberto Re, <alberto@accidia.net> Judith Lebzelter, <judith@osdl.org> COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.5 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available. perl v5.14.2 2012-03-18 Linux::Distribution(3pm)
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