gentoo

[Simon Slaytor]

I wouldn't call myself a Geek, but I'm currently running Gentoo on my
Dual G4 Gigabit.

No Gentoo dosn't have an installer like Yellow Dog so it takes a little
more work to install and get running, but it's not difficult and the
instruction are actually very good.

So why run Gentoo? well two reasons for me first it's way way way more
up-to-date than YD. I'm writing this e-mail on Ximian 1.4 running on
Gnome 2.4.2, Mozilla is 1.5 (popup blocking yeah!) and my kernel is
2.4.24 The second reason for installing Gentoo over YD was portage.

If your familiar with FreeBSD / NetBSD etc you'll know all about the
ports collection. If not let me give a brief example. 

On Gentoo if I wanted to install OGLE (DVD Video Player, requires DeCSS
etc), I simply call up a shell do a CD to /usr/portage/media-video/ogle
I then type emerge ogle. The Gentoo emerge system then takes care of
downloading OGLE and all dependencies, builds each one from source and
finally installs OGLE onto my Gnome menu.

No RPM's no missing / outdated libs etc it just works. You can update
your entire system as easily as emerge sync (get's the latest portage
collection) emerge --update --upgradeonly world (upgrades everthing to
the latest version included in the portage list)

All I can say is Gentoo is worth the little extra effort needed to get
it installed and running, plus you'll have a much better understanding
of Linux after it's done.

Regards

Simon


On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 11:51, Thierry de Coulon wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 March 2004 00:30, Larry Autry wrote:
> > It only took a glance at the Gentoo install doc to help me decide not to
> > install Gentoo. The document does not read like an install guide as does
> > the YDL install doc. It reads more like a reference book than a how-to.  If
> > I need a reference book, I'll download it. As an install document, the
> > document attempts to cover way too much territory. That's about as kind as
> > I can be.
> 
> The point is: you'll need that reference book to install Gentoo (which I did 
> on the PC but not on the Mac). I did it mostly to get a better understanding 
> in how Linux works.
> 
> Gentoo is not in the same league as YDL. It's clearly a distribution for 
> Geeks.
> 
> Thierry