[Sussex] Two questions!

[Geoff Teale]

John,

On the Gentoo issue.  Gentoo is maybe a  little harder still than Debian
- the instructions are very good and guide you through what is probably
the most involved installation procedure of any distro (short of Linux
>From Scratch).  The upside is that you learn a little bit about what
installers do behind the scenes (and how some of your system hangs
together), the downside is that you have to work out how to set up your
machines hardware.  If your goal is to learn about how Linux works then
you could do a lot worse than playing with Gentoo.  Equally if you want
to have the most cutting edge machine possible Gentoo is also the only
serious option.

I'd say have a go at least - Gentoo is the only distro I am actually
happy using in the day to day, it's a joy to manage and comfortbale to
work on (and I do work on it at least 10 hours a day seven days a week),
but the cost is a lot of sweat and tears in set up.

Gentoo 1.4 is a bit less painful than the 1.2 releases, to some extent
kernel compilation (including config) is automated and there are binary
"reference platform" packages to save the grind of downloading and
building things like XFree86 and Gnome/KDE etc..

-- 
GJT <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free software, free society