If you're really into going it on your own. There's gentoo, and there's LFS aka linux from scratch. Both of which impose a lot of source compilation. The inherent problem with sources is that you run into maintenance issues. i.e. If you use the same install for a long enough time, it'll eventually become unusable due to remnants of old versions and not enough hours in a lifetime to figure out what/where those are and manually correct. Ultimately you'll be doing fresh installs long before your hardware's expiration date. Not that I don't do regular installs myself. But I swap out hard drives every two years to be pro-active against that type of failure. And I do a lot of media editing, so I probably abuse my drives more than most. A distro is just a good ideal. There's configuration files that you really can't generate by hand without a pretty hefty understanding of what you are doing. Distros have done all this legwork for you and provide you with a sane default configuration file where you just need to uncomment a line to enable something or comment it to disable it. Lots of sanity saving things in a distro that you'll be scouring sources to figure out on your own in LFS land. And probably installing a distro anyway to cp their config. There's a lot to learn. But really you don't "need" to learn that stuff. There's no bread and butter / money in it. Sure you'll have a greater understanding. And should some do or die worst case scenario happen you'll know how to resolve it, where most other folks wont know where to begin. But really most IT jobs these days are installing and uninstalling and configuration gigs. We don't need to write a word processor, as one (several actually) already exist. And some of them aren't too shabby. As far as build systems. The configure + make + make install is the OLD way. Not all sources use that one. There's scons, mercurial, and various *make incarnations. And of course distro specific ways that are compatible with their package manager(s). Plus the typical development role of 1001 ways to do one thing. Fortunately alsa is still a bit old school. Or unfortunately depending on your POV. - James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content authoring tool. Experience the power of Track Changes, Inline Image Editing and ensure content is compliant with Accessibility Checking. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ephox-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list Alsa-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
