[Sussex] About Gentoo..

[STEVE WILLIAMS]

Dominic,

I've had Gentoo running on my notebook (dual boot with
WindersXP Pro) and my development server. Some notes
if you're contemplating Gentoo.

1. Don't even think about it if you haven't got
broadband with no bandwidth restrictions.

2. Expect your PC to spend a lot of time compiling -
and I mean A LOT!

3. Generally emerge works very well. I've had very few
problems, and most of those are down to me.

4. I've installed a few things manually - lilypond,
bind etc. and these haven't interfered with portage at
all. As Geoff says, as long as the non-gentoo stuff is
happy to make use of the existing resources (gcc etc.)
then everything's fine and dandy.

5. Kernel 2.6 definitely. (and udev, grub, bootsplash
etc.)

6. You'll learn a great deal about linux and computing
in general. Expect to give a lot more time to getting
it up and running, but the reward is a system that is
built the way you want. And mine is very atable as
well, even with the development sources.

7. Follow the on-line installation guide carefully
first time out.

8. If you've got another linux box consider using
distcc to speed up compiling.

9. There's plenty of Gentoo experience on the SLUG, so
please don't hesitate to ask.

10. The Gentoo forums are an excellent source of
troubleshooting/bugfixing info.

Plenty more, but maybe that's for the next moot.

Steve Williams.