DISTRO advise (was Re: [Nottingham] k3b install, yum, gcc and libs)

[chris stones]

The Gentoo Surgestion was mine.....

Here is why i would recomend Gentoo to every1.

All distro's have what they call "Package Management"
losts of distro's have differend Package management prgorams... RPM, 
TGZ, PORTAGE....
and each have advantages and dissadvantages.

Since redhat was mentioned.... ill talk about RPM's
Ok, they calculate dependency's for you. and thats it.
they will not solve them fro you, its your job to go on the internet, 
find it, then download it.

There ARE extensions to RPM's like YUM, which to a certain degree will 
auto-download and install for you.
however YUM is serverely limited... its only reealy good for updating 
the packages that come with your distro.

Portage by Gentoo is possibly the best Package management scheem ever !
ive been using gentoo for about a year... and ive never, ever come 
across a program which could not be auto installed by Portage...

Example.... I want to install Quake..... i would first search for 
porgrams called quake...

"emerge --search quake"

that would return a list of programs wth quake in there name and a short 
description.

"emerge --pretend quake"

will list the dependency's of quake.

"emerge quake"

that single command with a single parameter will Automatically download 
Quake source code.
Automatically download the source code of quakes dependecy's
Automatically Patch Quake if there is any need.

then Automatically Compile and Install Quake and all its dependency's 
With Optimisation for my Hardware.

you can install ANY open source porgram with one command.

you never have to worry about dependency's or where to download them from.

the only drawback, is time... it takes time to compile some programs..
in my 1333Mhz athlon it took....

3 hours to compile Linux.
1 Hour to compile Xorg
3 Hours to Compile KDE
2 hours to compile the extra optional  KDE programs i wanted.

so the first install will probably take all day.

but you end up with a super optimiesed distro' optimised for your 
machine hardware.
and totally customised... Think Linux From Scratch for people who cant 
be botered to do it themselves.

however... before you attempt an install you WILL need to know how to 
use a command line tect editing porgram called "nano"
but dont worry, any alterations to configs you make are just coppied 
from the install guide :)