Linux

Ah, the great granddaddy of Sourcemage, and I believe "Lunar Linux", if it's still around, was very dear to my heart - Sorcerer Linux, from which they both were forked.

Kyle eventually came up with an odd license for Sorcerer, probably due to his feelings following those forks, and Sorcerer may even predate Debian (but not Slackware - still the oldest extant and quite relevant distro), while SuSE began affectionately as 'the German Slackware fork, so maybe it predates Sorcerer too?

Anyway, if you look at all of the distros I've just mentioned (I should include Arch Linux in this list) they all have a source, or at least a rolling distro philosophy at heart. Debian is certainly package based, but Debian Testing (Sid too, and LMDE is or was) a true rolling distro along with Arch, which is more directly source based.

I don't mean to leave out Gentoo (or Funtoo), but it's very well known as a source based distro - moreso when you d/l'd it as Stage 1, 2, or 3 (methodology abandoned a long time ago).

People think that Slackware is package based like Debian too, and they would be correct, but everything after a full install is source based, SlackBuilds actually d/l the source from the various repos, then compile and make the package. You use one of a number of tools in 'package tools' to simply install the package, which takes a few seconds.

At the higher level you have dependency management and resolution (to your particular liking, too) using completely automated solutions like 'sbopkg', which uses customizable queue files for your deps and then downloads and compiles the source, creates the package, and installs it or a boatload of packages on one fell swoop while you make s sandwich.

The entire core operating system from a full (the recommended method) install can in one command, be completely recompiled and installed one your system in place - that means it's also true too day that Slackware is equally a source based distribution too... But that's not all.

Slackware -current is a fully rolling distro, and you can follow the daily changelog here:

http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=x86_64

You can also quickly create packages and install them from rpms and .debs, but most systems have those sorts of utilities, and people do maintain package repos, but the Slackware crowd has always been a but hesitant about installing packages that other people have made - you can read a SlackBuild though, in a very few lines you see the fetch, compile, and packaging. You can even add the line to install the package - it's all just shell script.

Sorcerer was a different breed however, after you install it once or twice (much like installing Gentoo from a stage one CD) that part of it no longer really much fun. Maintaining it can be, and the coolest thing about doing it back when on say, a 486DX2-66, is that your get to come home from work in the afternoon and your PC is still churning away like crazy, instead of just waiting very quickly - it would be such a shame for it to just sit there, lolz.

Sorcerer was all Bash, everything was a bash script. you could scry and cast spells, a lot of thematic corollaries to what Sourcemage is like. And then one day he just said he was done and that was it. I talked to him a few years later but yeah, kinda melancholy when a fav distro fades away. I felt that way about Mandrake Linux too. Mageia never really stuck with me, although I did work with it until the official general release. Mandriva is still going too.

Well, i just thought that I'd relate a few things about Slackware and I came across you mentioning Sourcemage and thought that was kewl 😎

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