[Sussex] Grub (becoming another gentoo thread...)

[Steve Williams]

On Tue, 2005-05-17 at 17:18 +0100, Simon Huggins wrote:
> 'ello LUG
> 
> On Tue, May 17, 2005 at 10:36:44AM +0100, Geoffrey J. Teale wrote:
> > Simon Huggins <huggie at earth.li> writes:
> > ----- %< -----
> > > I don't, honestly, think you want to be converted ;)

No, I don't take the view that one has to be slavishly loyal to a
specific distro, or to a source or binary based install.

I've invested a lot of time and effort in Gentoo. Consequently I have
learnt a huge amount about linux that I wouldn't have done otherwise. As
a bonus I've got Gentoo installs on desktop, server and notebook that do
everything I ask of them, and reliably as well.

What I want out of a binary distro is something to complement Gentoo. I
couldn't recommend Gentoo to beginners, those who have a large number of
PCs to manage or those who don't want the compilation overhead, so a
binary distro makes sense for them. However, the only downside of Gentoo
for me is the compile time. The only advantage of a binary distro is the
ease and speed of installation. If it can't meet these requirements then
it's appeal rapidly wanes. My experiences with Ubuntu and Arch recently
have disappointed, but that doesn't mean to say they are bad
distributions. It's just that my experience of them on my (admittedly
non-standard) spare box doesn't lead me to conclude that either Ubuntu
or Arch will form that complement to Gentoo that I want.

SUSE has installed on my spare box, so maybe I'll run that for a while.
Who knows, maybe I'll give Debian a go (bleeeuch, did I really say
that!).

> > I think that the answer is simply that Steve has learnt the Gentoo way
> > and doesn't want to relearn to move elsewhere - I find that most
> > people who are single distro zealots

I would not describe myself as a single distro zealot here Geoff, old
chap. Politics, however, is a different matter (don't use New
Labour) ....

>  fall into this mindset.  It's not
> > necessarily a bad point of view..
> 
> Sure but I'm more interested in the claims about grub than rehashing
> what he and you have said before...
> 

I never claimed there's anything wrong with grub - it's fine on my
Gentoo installs. However, the default Ubuntu grub setup couldn't cope
with my spare box configuration. I'm sure that some configuration work
would sort the problem, but that defeats my objectives for a binary
distro - that it should be installable with a minimum of work.

> Simon.
>