Hello, I'm a new poster (long time lurker), and I tried to start a thread about this a few days ago but it never appeared (I'm not sure as to why, I never received a message back from a moderator, so if I'm violating a rule, and I assure you I read them, I apologize).

Anyway, my favorite distro up until about 2003 or so was Sorcerer Linux. In its day, it was a serious competitor to Gentoo as the best source based distro going, but it ceased development after one of its developers left and forked it, creating Lunar Linux and its fork SourceMage. I never really felt that those were quite as ready for daily use as Sorcerer was, left for Gentoo and never looked back.

Anyway, I was feeling a bit nostaglic, and checked it out on Wikipedia. To my surprise, it appears to be actively developed again. I went ahead and downloaded an iso of the snapshot that was released in December 2012, but it is essentially the same as doing a Gentoo install, meaning that unless you have a state of the art workstation (and I use a 3 year old laptop) it will be a weekend job (especially if you're planning to use kde and compile it from source). So here is my question: Can someone tell me, 1. Is it in fact being developed? and 2. What state is it in, how usable is it, and does anyone currently use it as their day to day OS? I know this may seem stupid, but their website has no forum, no option for comments, and only extremely vague release notes. Any help would be appreciated, I'd really love to support Sorcerer again if it is indeed back.

For any who would like to investigate for themselves, here is the link: http://sorcerer.silverice.org/ Don't bother checking Distrowatch, they list the last release as 2004 and haven't had a news story since then either.

FWIW, Distrowatch says it's still active. Perhaps shoot Kyle an email?

kyle.sallee@gmail.com

I am attempting to install Sorcerer as a VM now. I have failed a few times but I do like the install routine.

I am going to fire one off, I think, but try to be very polite. The reason I hoped to get some LinuxQuestions feedback is that it seems a bit rude to me to fire off an email saying "So, is your distro REALLY back, and if so is it still any good?". I don't want to engage in gossip, but to make a long story short, there was a lot of drama that went down when Lunar was forked and Sorcerer declined in popularity, and I always felt that Kyle unfairly was blamed for a lot of it. He's a really good guy, and was always very helpful back in the day with a Linux newbie like myself (at least if my 10 year old memories are correct), so I didn't want to bum him out by sending him an email like that if he is getting Sorcerer back off of the ground. Like I said, a lot of people new to Linux may not remember, but there was a point in time where it really looked like a 50/50 proposition as to whether Sorcerer or Gentoo/Enoch was going to emerge as the premier source based distro, and I know it was a disheartening proposition to see Sorcerer slide down in popularity so quickly.

More to the point: I'm in the position right now where I own two computers, one for work that I am forced to use Windows on, and my personal use Linux laptop. So basically, to do a real install, I'm going to have to back up my data and be content to not use my normal laptop during the installation. I'm thinking I'll have to give it a shot and post my feedback here if no one else comes along, but I'd feel better going in knowing that someone else is actually using Sorcerer successfully as their primary OS.

I personally would like to follow your feedback, if you do that. What are you currently running on the Linux laptop, and what are the hardware specs? What do you see as being the primary advantages of Sorcerer vs. Gentoo? After doing some reading on the website, I'm intrigued...

A quick check showed there is a forum
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/sorcerer
but no-one's posted for 5 years! There are 2 bug reports that also date from 2008, and both unsolved. It does claim 16 developers, though.

Thanks for that, I must have overlooked it, though since it apparently is not being monitored LinuxQuestions was probably still the best place to post this. Anyway, I actually decided to order a new Chromebook that will be my Gentoo laptop, and will dedicate my old Lenovo Thinkpad X300 to try out Sorcerer on when the Chromebook comes. It has a 1.4 GHZ Core 2 Duo, with Intel integrated graphics a 128 GB SSD and 4 GB of DDR3. So I don't think it should be a problem in terms of hardware compatibility, it's just going to take that processor a bit to compile everything. Obviously I'm not expecting to get my fingerprint reader, camera, etc. running out of the box (although Sabayon was able to pick up on everything but the fingerprint reader with no fuss, surprisingly!), but I'll post all of my findings assuming I successfully get it up and running.

As to why I like Sorcerer, and to compare and contrast it to Gentoo: First, I should say that I haven't used Sorcerer since late 2003, so I can't comment on this current incarnation fairly. But, the main difference is the spell system, which I always liked quite a bit. Outside of that, it wasn't much different than Gentoo, the Grimoire was akin to Gentoo source repos and portage, and augur was the Sorcerer equivalent of emerge. Oh, and as to what I'm running currently, I have a dual boot of Sabayon and Gentoo which work perfectly fine on my hardware.

Well, I have managed to successfully install Sorcerer on the laptop I mentioned earlier and just thought I would provide some feedback for anyone else interested. First off, for those interested in giving it a quick test run, there is now a "Sentient" install, which gives you KDE and Firefox out of the gate (basically like using a Gentoo genkernel plus a KDE binary). However, the project goals must have changed in some way, because rather than being a bleeding edge distro it is now using the 3.2.4 kernel (I believe roughly the same kernel version that was just put in Wheezy), and the packages are all a few versions behind the latest release.

Really, I don't have a ton to say in the way of criticisms, just that the packages available are incredibly sparse, and if you intended to use it as your day to day OS it's going to be similar to jumping back to the early 2000's in terms of building and maintaining your applications yourself, from source on the command line. It's an odd mix, in a way, sort of a combination of Gentoo and Slackware (and I know that sounds bizarre), minus the benefit of having slackbuilds.org or Alien Bob to help you out. I actually think that there is a lot of potential there with this distro, though, I'm not sure why Distrowatch isn't updating the new releases or why the devs aren't trying to publicize it. I do think that it could fill an interesting niche, though, acting as a more stable and reliable competitor of Gentoo for those who prefer not to live on the bleeding edge. I'm going to write up an email better expressing my suggestions and send it off to Kyle, first off congratulating him for getting Sorcerer back off the ground and second for ways to hopefully attract more attention. If they could just build up the Grimoire to have a larger selection of applications, plus add support for UEFI (right now I don't think it would be possible to install on my new ChromeBook), this distro could really go somewhere.

Thanks for the update. That sounds like an interesting direction they're going in, I'll have to go look in on the project.