[Wolves] Gentoo

[Tom Edwards]

Chris Procter wrote:

>>Been playing around with
>>it for a couple of weeks, it's the best distro I've
>>ever used.
>>
>>fizz
>>    
>>
>
>Why? people rave abut gentoo but what is it that makes it so cool?
>
>chris
>
>  
>
Gentoo has some of the best features of apt, like huge numbers of 
packages (I haven't come across a package that isn't in the portage tree 
(even if it is sometimes masked/unavailable for some (good (lets see how 
many ()s I can nest) reason)) and ease of use (emerge -u world = apt-get 
dist-upgrade) without the horrible dependency issues that seem to keep 
cropping up for me.

It produces a stable, reasonably optimized system which is highly 
configurable and very usable by a competent Linux administrator (i.e. 
network configuration is not done through a GUI and so too rigid, like 
my experiences with Mandrake/RedHat). I would recommend it to anyone 
using Debian or Slackware to try at least, as it is defineatly worth 
looking at.

True new users should be aware and I wouldn't recommend it on anything 
but a reasonably fast system / broadband Internet connection, but I have 
been running this "install" of Gentoo for about 2 years now keeping it 
updated etc and the only problems I have encountered have been those 
that I've caused myself.

Usually all the packages are fairly recent, however I have noticed over 
the past few months that there is an increasing gap between a package 
being added to the portage tree and declared stable than there used to 
be (probably a good thing).

If you have time I highly recommend a look at Gentoo.

Tom