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

[Roger Light]

> This seems to be a question that goes around us newbies a lot, and I 
> have to say is one of the more difficult things to get past when 
> 'upgrading' from windows.  
> 
> 'Which distro?'.

Before I get on to evangelising, I'll just mention something that I belive Rob told me - apparently White Box is a repackaged version of Red Hat Enterprise. I've never looked at it so I can't comment further than that.

My distro of choice is gentoo, for my sins. The reason I started using it originally was that it was the first distro that recognised and had working all of the different hardware bits on my laptop. Since then I've put it on everything because it is what I know.

The first thing you'll hear about Gentoo is that it is compiled from source and so you can optimise it for your processor. Most distros are compiled to 386 code so there is some advantage is compiling specifically to a more recent processor if you aren't using 386s.
This isn't that big a deal to me. I've heard the same sentiment expressed by others as well. I tend to compile to 686 and leave it at that because this confers some advantages I'll mention later.

The big killer feature for a lot of people is the USE flags. USE flags allow you to configure optional parts of any packages you install. If you are installing on a server and don't want any support for sound or X, just add "-sound -X" (I just made those up - they may be incorrect but you get the idea) to your USE flags and anything that _can_ use sound/X but doesn't need to will have those features turned off.

Likewise you can add features that might not normally be used, say adding in support for network audio.

Another big thing for me is the init scripts. They are a dream. Based on ideas from FreeBSD I believe, they actually have dependencies built in so starting nfs will start the network, start portmap and then start nfs. If you then restart the network, it will stop nfs and portmap but restart them after the network is up. I never want to go back to specifing S56some_random_process again.

The documentation is pretty good. There is no installer but the guides on the website are all you need and you actually get to grips with the system rather than clicking buttons in an installer wizard. This is an advantage for the newbie in my opinion. I certainly learnt plenty installing gentoo for the first time and more to the point it left me in the situation where I actually had some idea of how things worked and how I could fix things. I used Mandrake (around 7.2 I think) a little before Gentoo and it was a doddle to install but I was a bit in the dark afterwards. That was a complete newbie outlook of course.

Any problem you have that isn't in the documentation will almost certainly have been covered in the forums, which are very active.

Like I said, there is no installer so you start with the bare essentials and go from there. This may be a little daunting at first but it does mean you end up with just what you want rather than the more usual case of having piles of apps installed.

Ok, so now the cons.

First and foremost is of course the compiling thing. With regards to the initial install, Gentoo provide an optional binary CD with at least enough to get you going with X and KDE/Gnome. This removes a lot of the initial compile time. Other than that, it depends how you want to deal with it. I tend to keep my machines reasonably up to date (synchronise the portage tree over night, browse any new packages in the morning, compile when I'm at work) so it is no big hassle to me at all. Having said that, I went to update my laptop the other day, having got a usb->ethernet adapter as the internal adapter died. It has been a few months since being updated and new versions of X, KDE and Gnome make it a little daunting.

There are some nice features to help you get around all this though. I have two machines at work using gentoo. A very nice feature of gentoo is the ability to use distcc when you are doing ordinary installs. Distcc distributes compile jobs among machines on a network that are running the distcc daemon. So one machine starts the install and farms out half of the compile jobs to the second machine. Result is that the package gets compiled quickly. The first machine also saves the installed package as a binary package and exports the folder where these packages live with nfs. This means the second machine just grabs the binary package and installs it. This will be even more effective when I get more machines running distcc :) Not quite so applicable for home of course.

Gentoo handles installs with ebuild files. These are very easy to write so if you find a package which doesn't have an ebuild you will be able to write one yourself. The files that were installed are recorded so when you come to uninstall (or upgrade) your custom ebuild, all of the files will be removed correctly.

I think I've run out of breath now.

Just one last thing to sum up my feelings: I reckon I'd settle for debian if it had init scripts like gentoo.

Cheers,

Roger

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