Source Mage GNU/Linux

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Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which we refer to as "spells", and a package manager called "Sorcery". Our packages are designed to allow the user to customize the package any way they want (custom CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, ./configure flags, etc.) as well as offering as many of the package options as possible to the user up-front (you will not need to know what options a package has or what optional dependencies it can use ahead of time). All of our scripts are GPL'd and our package manager and packages are written in bash, so they are easy to learn and modify. Sorcery supports custom packages maintained by users, which can override the default package and will never be touched by updates.

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Updated 14 May 2008 05:15 UTC

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about 1 month ago Avatar
What you want - no more, no less!

  by flux_control

My review is quite biased (I'm a dev for Source Mage). However, I will try to keep this as objective as possible, and I warmly invite anyone else to try out the distribution and contribute their own review, whether it agrees with my own or not.

I have run various distributions for reasonably lengthy periods of time (at least one year or more for each I have tried). The distro I used right before Source Mage was Gentoo. I have nothing ... [More] against gentoo itself - it's great for what it is. However, I felt that it was either not meeting what I interpreted it's design goals and philosophy to be, or was moving away from that over time (I started using gentoo around 2003 or so, and switched to Source Mage in 2006). Additionally, I think that gentoo and I didn't match perfectly to begin with. You may consider me to be somewhat meticulous and a bit of a control freak. At any rate, I was looking to do things that gentoo either didn't enable me to do, or things that were not easy to implement in gentoo.

Then came Source Mage. I read the introductory documentation on it, and immediately became excited. It looked very promising that I would be able to compile any programs I wanted on my system with any options I wanted, and have all of that tracked by the package manager. This was the kind of flexibility I was looking for. The installation medium was not as polished as it could have been (in particular, at the time the latest release was 0.9.5, which lacked any kind of support for LVM, so I had to install via chroot from inside of gentoo). However, I got past that, and the install is pretty much a one-time thing anyway. After that, it fufilled my expectations. I could "cast spells" (in Source Mage parlance) in quite the way that was demonstrated in the documentation - arbitrary compile options were not only accepted, but tracked and MAINTAINED across upgrades, on a per-spell basis. This is Source Mage's greatest strength, in my opinion. It means you get exactly what you want on your system. No more extra dependencies or software bloat. But you won't get a 'crippled' system either that is missing the features you need/want. Coming in a very close second, however, is the Source Mage user and developer community - one of the warmest bunch of people I have stumbled across. Many of us will go to great lengths to help a user (or even dev) go from a complete newbie on a subject to an expert, coaching them along the way.

From what I have seen, the package manager is also one of Source Mage's weaknesses. Because you get per-spell customization, it means you have to go through the rigamarole of answering a bunch of questions to every spell, even if it is the same question you have answered for other spells. The problem is alleviated from the fact that sorcery remembers what dependencies and options you have said yes/no to, but the questions are still there (even if they just pass on with your default values). This is where gentoo wins out with its use flags. In other words, setting up a Source Mage system from scratch to a fully-loaded desktop environment is a time-consuming process, and requires work.

Whether the setup for Source Mage is really a weakness depends a lot on who you are though. If you are an anal, meticulous, and control-freaky sys-admin like I am, then you will love Source Mage (by the way, we also strictly adhere to upstream, so things are guaranteed to work as expected, at least according to upstream). If you are looking for a system that "does things for you", then perhaps Source Mage is not for you. It is also a lot more demanding on users for knowledge of how linux systems work. But if you don't yet know, you can learn it through Source Mage (and our community will be happy to help). However, if you don't really know how things work, more likely than not your beginning experiences with Source Mage will be frustrating (don't give up though! Stick with it and you might really enjoy it ;-D).

Also, the installation medium is improving. The current stable release is rotting a bit from age, but we are getting closer to a new stable release. Additionally, the interface will be much more robust and support many more features. If you need any help or have any suggestions for the installation media, there are plenty of us willing to lend an ear/helping hand (especially me, as I'm a dev for the install media :-D). Give Source Mage a try. If you don't like it, get rid of it, but please tell us why first ;-). [Less]

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    Stable Grimoire version 0.20 has been released!

    Posted about 1 month ago by Paul J. Beel

    Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has announced that Source Mage GNU/Linux Stable Grimoire version 0.20 has now been officially released!

    As usual, users of stable merely need to run 'sorcery system-update'.
    Spells listed on the 0.20 release wiki ... [More] were tested and qualified to
    have no known defects of "gating" severity at the time of this release.
    The tarballs have been signed and uploaded to our server.

    To download the grimoire manually, get
    http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2 or specifically
    http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.20.tar.bz2.

    GPG signatures are available at
    http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable.tar.bz2.asc or
    http://codex.sourcemage.org/stable-0.20.tar.bz2.asc.

    I would like to thank Eric Sandall (sandalle) and Mathieu Lonjaret
    (lejatorn) for searching the base system spells for bugs and testing them.

    Check out the version 0.20 wiki page for more details.This site will be devoted to Source Mage GNU Linux. Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which are referred to as "spells", and a package manager called "Sorcery". MagePower will include SMGL news, developer interviews, how-to's and more. [Less]

    Source Mage European Meeting

    Posted about 1 month ago by Paul J. Beel

    Do you like mages, Linux and hacking? There is still some heavy discussion on the mailing list about the Source Mage GNU/Linux European Meeting. The good news is, if you are interested in finding out more, there is now a wiki page dedicated to it. ... [More] This would be very cool to attend, so check out the European Meeting wiki to see ongoing updates to the event.This site will be devoted to Source Mage GNU Linux. Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which are referred to as "spells", and a package manager called "Sorcery". MagePower will include SMGL news, developer interviews, how-to's and more. [Less]

    News (4-7-2008)

    Posted about 1 month ago by Paul J. Beel

    Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has asked for some checking to be done on the latest Stable release, version Stable-0.20. He states the new release will be on schedule, but would like other people to test spells to make sure it is stable.

    Arwed von ... [More] Merkatz aka Alley_Cat has just been voted the new Grimoire Lead Developer. Congratulations to Arwed!

    Many Source Mage developers have been discussing a European Meeting. They are still discussing a date, but they think the location will be somewhere in Germany. If you are interested, you can follow the discussion on the Source Mage discuss mailing list.

    Ismael Luceno has been writing a new spell called Spellfoster. In Ismael's words, "Spellfoster is inspired by debfoster, a Debian tool that makes removal of unwanted applications a trivial task. We have "dispel" and "gaze orphans", but from what Eric Sandall and Ismael explained Spellfoster puts a dialog around orphans which are not held, making an easy to use list. It sounds interesting, keep up the good work Ismael!

    We have a new developer! Long time user Jeremy "Belxjander" Sutherland has joined the circle of Mages. He is interested in working on Cauldron, Init scripts, Grimoire and more. Welcome Jeremy!

    Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has sent me some nice git tips. I will be posting them soon.This site will be devoted to Source Mage GNU Linux. Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which are referred to as "spells", and a package manager called "Sorcery". MagePower will include SMGL news, developer interviews, how-to's and more. [Less]

    Sorcery Usability Study Results

    Posted about 1 month ago by Paul J. Beel

    Today, our own Jaka "lynx" Kranjc sent out a revolutionary e-mail. This one could change the course of Source Mage GNU/Linux forever.

    "Fresh users keep confusing sorcery commands up and some of the experienced users occasionally complain ... [More] about that too. So me and my friend S. A. (a HCI student) have made an usability study on how to improve the situation. We realised that the simplest thing to do would be to shorten the command names, so they consume less biomemory, save you from RSI and give you more time for other unimportant stuff.

    Implementation notes
    The proposed fix is to implement wrapper scripts (since aliases don't work everywhere) with the mentioned user-friendly names. The scripts would be put into /sbin, so they'd work even if you had /usr mounted on an unreachable network share or otherwise unavailable. When your system is in dire need of assistance, it is really annoying if things you are used to working with don't work anymore (a double annoyance).

    So here is the sorted initial list of the shortcuts and what they woud run:
    cc - cast --queue (who can spell queue anyway?)
    cp - cleanse --prune
    dd - dispel --downgrade
    gs - gaze search
    gv - gaze version
    sg - sorcery upgrade
    sh - sorcery hold
    sq - sorcery -q
    su - scribe update

    As you can see, the list contains only the most frequently used (sub)commands, so feel free to suggest more. I also do realise that 'su' could be thought of as 'sorcery update', but since the latter is used less often, scribe has precedence. Maybe 'sup' or 'soup' would do?

    The code is already in my repository, I'm just waiting for your comments, mages, so I can finalize it to perfection."

    Unfortunately, this met with some criticism. ;)
    But possibly some new ideas?

    flux_control says:
    "In my opinion these are a very bad idea. They will confuse users more (because the meaning behind them will be hidden), and worse, they will confuse the user's system (try doing a "cp X Y" when cleanse is renamed..or compile something with cast --queue? :-P). In my opinion it's better to keep the sorcery/cleanse/etc., but clean up the name space for consistency. As an example, dispel -d doesn't dispel (well,
    OK, it does, but it also casts, which is the important part). This should be moved to cast -d in my opinion. Also, having all the different cast/gaze/cleanse/scribe commands accessible via sorcery (like sorcery cast $SPELL) would help, because then users really only need to remember one command: sorcery. If they forget what to do with it, RTFM :) If someone wants the short commands, then they can make their own aliases or wrapper scripts."

    Ladislav Hagara says:
    "I also do not like this idea. It is very confusing. Moreover most of your shortcuts are regular names of Unix commands.

    For new users I would created links started with smgl- (smgl-cast; smgl-dispel; smgl-scribe; ...) so if user does not know the right command he/she just writes smgl- and presses TAB and can see all sorcery commands.

    Users can use bash-completion."

    Sandalle says:
    "That may not be a bad feature to have added: symlinks of smgl- to ."

    Swoolley says:
    "man sorcery
    see also section"

    Sandalle says:
    "Yeah, just thinking of those who like TAB completion or are new, have RTFM'd, but can't remember the exact command."

    Jaka "lynx" Kranjc says:
    "> Users can use bash-completion.
    This can go in with the boring namespace. So for every command there'd be a sm- or smgl-$command and a smgl-$(boring $command) (like smgl-uninstall). Not sure if this should be part of sorcery though, as it is trivial to implement in a spell and less trivial in sorcery.

    The shortcuts can be done the same way and then the spell added to basesystem."This site will be devoted to Source Mage GNU Linux. Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which are referred to as "spells", and a package manager called "Sorcery". MagePower will include SMGL news, developer interviews, how-to's and more. [Less]

    This Week in SMGL (March 25th 2008)

    Posted about 1 month ago by Paul J. Beel

    I have been extremely busy lately and Mage Power has suffered because of it. I hope to get back on track now. Hold on to your wizard hat, here we go!

    The Cauldron Team has been working on the new Source Mage GNU/Linux ISO once again. They ... [More] really need everyone possible to test this. Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer had this to say:

    "There is a new ISO release! You can find the goodness at
    New Test ISO

    Please go and test this as soon as you are able. We in Cauldron are working hard to get a new stable (everyone knows we need one), but we need YOU to test the ISOs in order to get them stable. The more hardware it gets tested on, the better.

    If you find anything wrong with it, don't be shy - file some bugs on our bugzilla at http://bugs.sourcemage.org. You can also complain to me on IRC or via email, but please still file the bugs, as that is really the best way for us Cauldron devs to keep track of things."

    To some up the changes for this release, Flux also had this to say:
    "It's a bugfix. It should resolve all the bugs with the previous ISO release in February, as well as a few that BearPerson and I caught that no one actually saw when testing it. I think a few new features crept in."

    So download the new ISO and help test! It's for the greater good!

    Jaka "lynx" Kranjc has just released a new stable and test Sorcery!
    "Stable Sorcery 1.13.8 has been released! It is mostly a bugfix release. Notable changes include the no-check-certificate source hint and a more informative error message on source hash mismatch."

    "Test Sorcery 1.14.0 has finally been released! Two years in the making, it contains lots of new features, changes and bugfixes. These release notes are best viewed on the wiki at Sorcery_1.14.0_Release_Notes
    Due to its size, the ChangeLog is not included in this mail. You can read it on the mentioned wiki page or from the tarball.

    IMPORTANT: To use staging, you first need to install castfs.

    This release also marks a new devel-development stream, so if you want to work on any (new) features, the time is right. Bugzilla, users and me are full of ideas. There are already a few smaller projects submitted to bugzilla, but most need a bit more work and polish. In any case, there's plenty of fun stuff to work on (fun as in pink ponies, not bsdm) and I'd gladly mentor any* of it.

    My plan for 1.15 includes (more or less) what is filed on bugzilla under that version - notably improved ressurect - and miscellaneous improvements like the gaze time set of functions and better messaging. I also feel a need, a need for speed!

    Go forth and testify."

    Wow, with a new ISO and new Sorcery, Source Mage users are receiving some good stuff! Keep up the good work Mages!

    In other news, you might have noticed http://www.sourcemage.org has removed the old Drupal site and is now running a wiki instead. News will be displayed right here on Mage Power. If you have any Source Mage news, please do not hesitate to contact novaburst on the #sourcemage irc channel or e-mail me at pbeel(AT)magepower(DOT)org.

    Dale E. Edmons (linuxfan) has stated his interest in maintaining the "castfs" spell. Castfs is a fuse-based file system that monitors changes on a staged installation environment to then merge with the system (which actually helps Sorcery in tracking what was installed better than InstallWatch). Plus, Elisamuel "ryuji" Resto has just added a new castfs repo at http://repo.or.cz/w/castfs.git.

    Bertrand Juglas has kindly created a French version of the Source Mage wiki. Here is his e-mail to the mailing list.
    "Hello, http://www.sourcemage.org/SourceMageWikiFrench is now created and will list all french wiki pages and all wiki pages needing french translation.
    This page was already linked on the homepage http://www.sourcemage.org so now we have the links for French and Japanese which exists, that's why I've put Japanese just after French.
    Hope that will begin a new French effort in the Source Mage community."
    Thank you Bertrand!

    In conclusion, nominations for a new Grimoire Team Lead are under way. Sadly, Eric Sandall will not be able to continue as Grimoire Lead for now. He mentioned he is very busy at the moment, but will continue to work with the project of course.

    Until next time Mages, keep casting those spells!This site will be devoted to Source Mage GNU Linux. Source Mage is a source-based GNU/Linux distribution based on a Sorcery metaphor of "casting" and "dispelling" programs, which are referred to as "spells", and a package manager called "Sorcery". MagePower will include SMGL news, developer interviews, how-to's and more. [Less]

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