I actually picked up Gentoo recently (and my employers are paying me to
do so, so hah.) My impressions follow:
Initial install was something of a pain. Yes, it's well documented,
and yes, it's neat and all, but ultimately, rather than a 20 page
HOWTO, it could very well have been a 4 page #!/bin/sh.
Portage is very nice, with its dependancies, and it's purpose specific
make.conf & co. Not even for optimization: I'm putting together a
light duty server out of cannibalized parts, so I neither need nor want
X or any window management. So, I add "-X" to USE, and I'm done as far
as customizing goes. Nice. The compilation is lengthy, but I'm
tempted to say "whatever." We're talking about establishing a full on
snort NIDS, and I'm tempted to build a snort secondary box, and then
set all it's installed packages as tbz2's for the rest.
My real gripe is that it's boot control is BSD-like. Eh. Bunch of
scripts live in /etc/init.d. Which means that a> It's very easy to add
commands that should run once on boot, but that b> it's not so easy to
use init.d scripts by hand and c> there's no guarantees about
maintaining services once they're up. (I was amused, though, that
svscan (of djb's daemontools) was installed as an /etc/init.d script...)
j
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Received on 07/31/03
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