Gentoo Forums

I just stumbled over crux and archlinux. they seem me to offer the same thing as gentoo does. except they seem to be optimized for i686 processors. does this mean they are binary based distors? because their package manager always say something about installing tar.gz packages.
so what's the deal with this distros? are they any good? I'm kind of tired of recompling my system every now and then.

They are both binary distros.

Portage , better documented resources and an outstanding community.

Ugh...nevermind.

I recently moved my main machine over to Arch and it is a good distro.

As tln says, they are based on binaries, the tar.gz or .tgz files names are simply because the binaries are tarred then bzipped to make downloads smaller.

However, you can install anything you like with the source code as Arch also has something called abs - a repository of, for a comparison, 'ebuilds' that allow installation via source code (or you could do it the old fashioned way - by hand).

You can make abs files for others to use (like Gentoo users sharing ebuilds).

It is slower than Gentoo (though not a lot) but just as easy to use and the forums, although much, much smaller than these ones are just as friendly (in my experience anyway).

Also, as Mystilleef says, the documentation is pretty bad at Arch but if you use Gentoo then you won't really need to use them - I only glanced at one and that was the alsa config for Arch, everything else is pretty self-explanatory and the config files are described adequately in the install manual.

The only other advantage over Gentoo that I can think of is a full working install in about 40 minutes. I like it, but will keep my laptop on Gentoo as it is optimised for my old pIII

tln wrote:They are both binary distros.

... You haven't used CRUX, have you?

Basically, CRUX is a BSD-like GNU/Linux OS. Great community. A lot less packages then Gentoo, and no dependancy checking for anything in the "official" ports. It's like Slackware, only with nothing but a few very base packages compiled (X, WindowMaker, Firefox, etc) and it fetchs the sources for you.

A base install is about comparable to a gentoo-stage1, though you can install everything from packages up to X and WM as a window manager, and you have actual control over what packages would go in "system." There are a good number of community supported ports and tools which have dependancy resolution pre-build, but the power is that you can build what you want if you know what your doing without pulling in anything you don't want. IMHO, the big advantage over Gentoo with CRUX is that the whole inits process is handled by ~4 main shell scripts. All options are handled in one rc.conf file, as it should be in a BSD inspired OS. (There's no "cat myhost > /etc/hostname; cat mydomain > /etc/dnsdomainname; vi /etc/conf.d/rc.conf; vi /etc/net.eth0; vi /etc/net.eth1" business, it's all in one location for easy access)

As for Arch, it is merely a binary-only fork of CRUX with dependancy resolution. Not sure when they split but it was sometime prior to CRUX 1.3 I believe.