From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753678AbZEYPBT (ORCPT ); Mon, 25 May 2009 11:01:19 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752074AbZEYPBN (ORCPT ); Mon, 25 May 2009 11:01:13 -0400 Received: from vena.lwn.net ([206.168.112.25]:36090 "EHLO vena.lwn.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751778AbZEYPBM (ORCPT ); Mon, 25 May 2009 11:01:12 -0400 Date: Mon, 25 May 2009 09:01:12 -0600 From: Jonathan Corbet To: Rik van Riel Cc: John Walsh , linux-kernel Subject: Re: What Distro is best for Starting Kernel Dev? Message-ID: <20090525090112.3919d117@bike.lwn.net> In-Reply-To: <4A1819CB.9010104@redhat.com> References: <9f7f2c020905221910m2ffe4c53v8fd5dbc6cd236602@mail.gmail.com> <4A1819CB.9010104@redhat.com> Organization: LWN.net X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.7.1 (GTK+ 2.16.1; x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sat, 23 May 2009 11:44:11 -0400 Rik van Riel wrote: > John Walsh wrote: > > What Distro is best for Starting Kernel Dev? > > If you want to learn more about the system than > anybody should ever need to know, you can stick > with a bleeding-edge development distro like > Fedora Rawhide, Mandriva Cooker or Debian Unstable. I do the bulk of my work on such distributions, but if you're really wanting to get started with *kernel* development, there is one thing to be aware of: development distributions can be an independent source of instability/weirdness in a system. If you're at an early stage with the kernel, you may want to minimize the number of variables which can be changing at once. So it might make more sense to base your work on a distribution which is not changing underneath you. jon