[Klug-general] Shiny New Laptop

[klug at allen.brooker.gb.net]

What exactly is "hackish" about Gentoo?

Yes, on the one hand you have to wait for things to compile - but I can 
generally find other things to busy myself with while that's happening. 
On the other hand I get the latest packages, packages for many 
commercial games and other commercial products, a config file management 
system that unlike any other distro I've used has never over-written one 
of my config file changes to date unless I've told it to, and even if it 
does, dispatch conf can back-up to a cvs store so you can rollback any 
changes you didn't want made.

To top it all off, it uses an excellent package management system which 
allows rolling updates as opposed to the monolithic updates proscribed 
by other distros and allows you to individual mask, unmask and control 
the features installed for all packages. In addition, since the package 
management system is built on bash script, it's a doddle to 
roll-your-own (see http://allenjb.me.uk/ for some of mine) or correct 
bugs or just things you don't like in others in minutes.

The way the package management system is written also means that if, for 
example, you're on amd64 arch, but there's a package you want that's 
currently marked x86 arch only, with a couple of lines you can "unmask" 
it and install it. If it works you then be a good citizen and file an 
issue - most likely it'll shortly be marked "testing" on your arch, if 
not there's probably a good reason.

But, I don't see what's hackish about any of that. If anything - your 
binary distro's are more hackish because they get around problems with 
different library versions and such by forcing everyone to exactly the 
same version of every product and no support for naything else.

As for Gentoo on laptops - I've been running my laptop on Gentoo for 
well over 6 months with no problems at all. If anything I personally 
think Gentoo is better for laptops than binary distros because you can 
conserve more battery power by not running a lot of the cruft binary 
distros force on you - all those different sound daemons for example 
(both my main PC and laptop run perfectly on pure alsa)

Allen =P

Karl Lattimer wrote:
>>It will be fun getting Gentoo Linux on there, and ofcourse I will be making copious notes as I go...
>>
> 
> 
> You sure you wanna stress the processor with that much compiling, I
> honestly can't see the point of gentoo myself. Its too hackish to be
> useful IMHO, ubuntu, suse and fedora are much more popular because they
> don't take 2 days to install properly.
> 
> But hey, if you wanna go down that route, then its your choice. 
> 
> BTW: I think my laptop looks better ;)
> 
> http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=powerbook+12&hl=en&btnG=Search
> +Images
> 
> and its made of metal, the OS is brilliant, XiNU (X is Not Unix) kernel
> and system.ui are very well designed, shame its not as fast as Xgl but I
> have my desktop for that so I don't mind.
> 
> K,