Re: How to pick a distro?

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

At 07:45 PM 4/7/2005 +0000, Jeremy Abbott wrote:
[...]
>I bought Suse about a year ago.  Very nice Distro with package
>management through Yast.  My problem with it though, was that it does
>not come with a C compiler.  If all youare installing is binary
>packeges, that's fine.  I wanted to do some compiling from source though.

Are you sure of this, Jeremy?

I just checked the online package repository for SuSE at 
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current/suse/i586, and there I see all the 
usual compiler packages ... for example: gcc (the C compiler), g++ (the C++ 
variant of gcc), the *-devel header files for the libraries, gdb (the 
standard debugger) and ddd (its X frontend).

I suspect that either what you bought was a limited subset of SuSE ... 
possible, I suppose, since the iso image for the full distro is about 3.5 
GB, requiring a DVD to hold it ... or you misunderstood the docs that came 
with what you got.

I can't recall ever seeing a full-size Linux distro that did not include 
the full suite of compilers it needed to compile all its own source. If 
nothing else, you need this to compile custom kernels, a fairly common 
activity among experienced users of all distros.

And as we all know, anyone who provides you with a CD or DVD of binaries 
needs to provide you with access to the associated source, at least for the 
GPL'd packages.


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