[Gllug] gentoo

[Pete Black]

Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you really 'get' what gentoo is about. 

If you want a distro that comes on a CD from John at LinuxEmporium, then you
don't want gentoo. 

The tarballs on your disk will most likely be a stage3 boostrap iso. This should
get you up and running with a basic desktop. However, the first time you run 
'emerge -u world', you will be downloading hundreds of megabytes of stuff since 
it is very likely that a significant portion of the portage tree has been updated 
since the CD you have was burnt.

Gentoo will almost certainly be a poorer solution than Redhat, Debian or practically
any other distro if you are not specifically interested in having all the latest
packages downloaded and built from source, on a frequent basis.

People hear gentoo fans raving about it (i am a gentoo fan, and i really like it), and
seem to think they are missing out on something mystically wonderful,  but this is not 
the case in reality.

You should understand that gentoo requires major investment in terms of bandwidth, cpu 
time and hours spent tweaking things which work 'out of the box' on other distros.

I expect to spend hours messing about configuring things down to the smallest detail. 

If C++ ABI or glibc changes break every major program on my machine (e.g. mozilla, 
openoffice etc.) I really don't care that my gentoo box sits there for days 
(it is only a Celeron 366) recompiling everything,as I have other machines I can
continue to work on.

If there is a problem with any aspect of the system, I am confident of my abilities
to solve it, even if it means hacking code, modifying Makefiles  or understanding 
cryptic configuration files.

Unless you too are prepared to accept these guidelines, I could not in good faith
tell you that gentoo is the distro for you.

I don't want to see you waste hours getting gentoo up and running only to find that
it really does not provide any capabilities you need, or even want. 

-Pete


 
> Many thanks for your reply. Thanks also to Pete Black, but Pete, I don't
> want to download everything from gentoo.org - I could get a CD overnight
> from John at Linuxemporium if I wanted to go that way.
> 
> Incidentally, I did understand most of the portage facility. I'm prone
> to crude analogies, and I equated it to the way that in Debian I
> download source code, automatically create a .deb package and install

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