[NTLUG:Discuss] An NTLUG Distro

[Ben Weatherall]

I remember several times when there were distro hack sessions (Knoppix
sticks in my mind, but I think I have seen one on Ubuntu as well).
Perhaps instead of coming up with a complete distro, a base could be
selected and it customized for NTLUG purposes.

Just a thought,
-Ben Weatherall

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at ntlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ntlug.org] On
Behalf Of Justin M. Forbes
Sent: Friday, April 03, 2009 12:11 PM
To: NTLUG Discussion List
Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] An NTLUG Distro

On Thu, Apr 02, 2009 at 10:17:56AM -0500, Daniel Hauck wrote:
> I just read some commentary regarding criticism and Linux.  The 
> original notion was that Linux needs more critics to keep it moving.  
> Another person pointed out that the reason there are so many very 
> different Linux distros out there is because it is essentially
"criticism applied."
> 
> This got me to thinking.  Chris Cox is unquestionably a really smart 
> fellow with strong views on various things.  I wouldn't think to 
> suggest this if I didn't think he was smart enough to pull it off.
> 
> What about an NTLUG Distro project?  It would naturally be more of an 
> exercise than something we could expect to actually catch on in the 
> wild.  But not only could it be used as a vehicle to express critical 
> views of other distros by addressing them, but could also serve as an 
> educational experience in rolling one's own distro.
> 

As someone who has both created an architecture port of an existing
distribution (x86_64 for Fedora Core 1) and acted as almost the sole
maintainer for another distribution for a long period of time, I have to
say this is not a small project.  Just keeping up with security updates
is almost a full time job on a general purpose distribution.  When you
start looking at cobbling a full distro together without just
repackaging  the bits you want from an existing distribution to do the
integration work you have even more problems.  It is more than a
fulltime job for at the very least a handfull of people.  I am not
saying that it is impossible, in fact it is very possible if you have
the right people involved, but what is your time worth?  Maintaining a
distribution is a grind, and instead of working on nifty upstream pieces
you end up just trying to keep your head above water with bugfixes and
security updates.  And that doesnt include the effort to initially
create and stabalize the distribution.  I am very happy to be working
for a company that has understands this, has a good number of resources,
and gives developers time to work on both our products and upstream.

Justin M. Forbes

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