Re: [Nolug] Gentoo?

On Thu, 2003-07-31 at 16:09, Judson Lester wrote:
> 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...)

You might find Debian more useful, then. No need to compile sources,
and all "systems" are broken into multiple packages.

For example, to install Python, Mandrake makes you also install XFree,
because there are only a few big RPMs.

Debian breaks things into lots of smaller packages. Thus, Python
works like a charm on my headless f/w.

-- 
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| Ron Johnson, Jr.        Home: ron.l.johnson@cox.net             |
| Jefferson, LA  USA                                              |
|                                                                 |
| "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals, I'm a vegetarian  |
|  because I hate vegetables!"                                    |
|    unknown                                                      |
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