Re: [Nolug] Gentoo?

Hello,

I've been using Linux for years, and Gentoo for a few months. I finally
decided to go for it one day, after a hard drive died :)

It's been really good to me. The setup is not necessarily tricky (just RTFM)
but long, depending on the CPU and RAM. It will take several hours (or days)
to get the basic system (stage1) installed. Alternatively, you can install
pre-compiled stuff. I went the more "pure" way and compiled everything for
the CPU.

Emerge is a good tool and has come a long way since I first looked at gentoo
(back in the pre 1.2 era). Though it doesn't have as many packages as in the
freeBSD ports or even debian, it's growing and there's a good chance most
packages that you'd need are available. If not, just grab the source. No
biggie.

The configuration options are what really interested me. Almost everything can
be tweked, most notably the options with which packages can be compiled. You
can decide if you want kde or gnome libs for a certain program, or ncurses,
nls, esd, arts, etc. This way, you can end up with binaries that fit your
need. You can also override this at any time.

I'd say that gentoo is more of a desktop/workstation meta-distro. That's just
the feel of it. I've never tried it on a server, though there's probably no
reason as to why it woudl not be stable. The default gentoo kernel is pretty
good and has lots of neat patches (preempt, low latency, grsec, misc goodies)
and has worked fine for me.

If you don't mind compiling everything from source, but want the extra (though
maybe not noticeable every time) speed that optimized binaries can offer you,
give it a try.

There are good mailing lists,and the forums on gentoo.org have a lot of info
that have helped me several times.

Enjoy.

ml

On Wednesday 30 July 2003 04:56 pm, Joey Kelly wrote:
> Hey y'all,
>
> I'm considering doing a fresh Linux install (my current system is SuSE 7.2,
> which was installed almost 2 years ago, and upgraded 1 year ago to SuSE 7.3
> ). Who has run Gentoo, and what are your thoughts about it? Mostly I want
> to hear from those who have been running Linux for a couple of years or
> more... the opinion of a newbie ("I just dual-booted my Windoze XP box last
> week, and Gentoo is great!") doesn't really interest me --- no offense,
> mind you --- I simply want a seasoned evaluation:-)
>
> To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I also use NetBSD, and always
> compile apps instead of "pkg_add ftp://path/to/binary". Since Gentoo's
> portage is taken from BSD ports, I'm interested in whether Gentoo will give
> me any justice.
>
> Thanks.

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Received on 07/30/03