Does anyone remember Sorcerer Linux? What ever happened to the distribution?
I’m afraid I’m a recent convert, so before my time…
I have used ubuntu 5.10. I still have the cd. I’ve never heard of this one. What was the purpose?
Hello,
Yes, Sorcerer Linux was a source based distribution known for its unique package management system called “sorcery,” which compiled software directly from source code.
I thought Gentoo was like that, never tried it though. I am plenty happy with Debian.
Hello from both the future and the past!
I worked on Sorcerer for a short while towards the middle/end of its lifetime. In addition to being among the first source-based distros, it was primarily novel for its magic-themed administration scheme (cast to install a package, dispel to uninstall a package, packages are spells, spells live in a grimoire, etc), the thing where all of the administration utilities are written largely in pure Bash, and largely being the fever dream of a single developer.
The last of these is also, basically, what happened to it. Initially, that sole dev kinda dropped off the face of the earth at the height of the distro’s popularity, so the community decided to fork Sorcerer GNU/Linux to a new project. The distro and all related stuff was GPL-licensed, so that wasn’t a problem …
Until the original dev returned to this plane of existence and decided that everybody involved with that fork was a horrible person (which may be true, but there’s no evidence for this), rebranded the project without the GNU, replaced the GPL with the “SPL” (a project-specific incredibly unfriendly license), and got back to work.
In dude’s defense, he was pretty good at what he did, and the various forks of the last open source release of SGL fell behind for quite a while on the technology front. Where they won was not having a single questionable ego in charge of the whole ordeal and having community buy-in. Both Lunar Linux and Source Mage were still active in the past five years or so (as of this writing), while Sorcerer itself died a somewhat agonizingly slow death.