Re: [school-discuss] Installing From Tar

[LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> One place where I did see a recent version of BASIC-256
> was in the FreeBSD world. In the hope of making things
> easier, I installed PCBSD....

FreeBSD works very efficiently on laptops and low resource systems
(even more so than Linux in many cases) and it does have a nice
selection of pre-built packages.  However, it does lack a lot of
driver support that Linux has.  So, I can see where Internet
connection could be a serious issue with it.

> There's an idea that I want to toss in, since this group is
> aimed at education.... It might be useful to make my
> situation the basis for a school's class project, presumably
> at the level of high school or college undergrad. As the
> students worked on ways to give me what I need, they
> (and I) would learn more about the details of Linux;
> they would also get experience in providing technical
> support to an end user. I figure it couldn't hurt.

Having a class try to work through a Linux from Scratch book seems
like a good way for them to learn the internals.

I have been working on a project of my own for several years now.  I'm
not really interested in building the entire operating system (such as
the kernel) from scratch, but I'm trying to automate the functionality
to build all the programs I'm interested in running on my machine from
scratch.  I'm trying to find programs that provide necessary
functionality to get particular jobs done that are portable and have
readable source code.  I don't want to be tied to any one operating
system.  I also want to be able to continue to maintain the code in
case it's no longer being actively developed or maintained.  I'm
automating the build processes as much as possible because building
from source, especially if you need to update each time the source is
updated on active projects can be very time intensive.  I'm also
picking software that might not be the most popular and even porting,
debugging or coding some applications from scratch in some cases.  I
want to come up with something that can be maintained by one person
and doesn't require a whole range of volunteers just to maintain
packages.  I have seen more than one Linux distribution with a goal of
trying to just offer one application per function.  While I want to
simplify what I'm working with, having just one application for a
category like graphics editing or music creation, just doesn't work
for me.  So, I'm not restricting the number of applications in a
category like some systems do.  I'm trying instead to find
applications that are written efficiently, have less intensive build
requirements, etc.  I have quite a few interesting applications I've
found and quite a few I'm still trying to port so they'll work on more
operating systems or work with specific libraries.  There's also a lot
I'm still trying to customize to make the applications user friendly
by my definition of user friendly.  Since I started investigating
maintaining the software myself and building everything from source,
I've changed a lot of my opinions on what software I prefer to run.
Some popular Open Source programs out there might as well be
proprietary commercial programs when you try to build or maintain them
from source.  Also, a lot of code that some people think is so stable
and should not be altered by users, is really not as well-coded or
stable as they think.  To me, the main point of choosing an Open
Source program is to be able to build the program from source.
Otherwise, why bother when a proprietary program can do the job just
as well?  If you can't take over the maintenance when a company (or
group of developers) goes out of business and continue to modify and
build the product or add features you need, what good is the software?
 When the project is more complete, I'm hoping it will make a useful
tool for students who might want to learn about how to build, install
and maintain all the programs they work with.  However, if nothing
else, it will let me more easily maintain all the programs I prefer to
work with.

By the way, I'm currently at the point of looking at C runtime library
code in order to get better cross-platform support and I'm really
surprised by at least some of the inefficiencies and design decisions
I'm seeing.

If anyone's interested in comparing notes on efficient, lightweight
applications or is interested in sharing code, feel free to contact
me.  I have alternatives to several popular GNU utilities and some of
their libraries.  I'm experimenting with using PicoGL in place of
OpenGL in some areas and I'm looking into using lightweight GUI
libraries with DirectFB or nano-x or similar alternatives instead of X
Windows.

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/cpp
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