[TriLUG] gentoo linux

[Jonathan Rippy]

> Prior to this which distro did you use?  

I've used or experimented with, 
in reverse chronological order:

 1.) Gentoo
 2.) Sorcerer
 3.) Debian Stable
 4.) Redhat
 5.) Suse
 6.) Caldera
 7.) Redhat
 8.) Slackware
 9.) Redhat
10.) Slackware (circa 1994)

> What do you like about it?

I remember the nightmare days of doing most
things by hand under Slackware back in '94.
The various commercial distros made things
like X configuration much easier but I feel
that it also removed some of the knowledge 
of how things work.  I like knowing how
things work, one of the tenets of open source
right?  :)  (Maybe they didn't explicitly remove
the knowledge but I was less driven to find out
how things worked because a GUI could do it 
for me.)

Many, many applications have "ports" for them.
I've only found 1 application that I've wanted
to use that hasn't been ported yet.  (gnomemeeting)
I plan on writing a port for it at some point if
no one gets to it before I do.

Some things I have working:
  KDE, XMMS, my TV Card with Xawtv, Mozilla,
  Apache, Mysql, Sun's JDK 1.4, SSH, 
  NVIDIA accelerated drivers for X, among others....

> If I understand gentoo and Sourceror correctly, 
> they dont have any binary packages.  You build 
> everything from source.  Which I don't think would 
> be a problem if you have a fast machine and lots of 
> disk space.  What appeals to me is that it claims 
> to be more up-to-date than the other distros.  I 
> don't know how much more up-to-date it is than 
> Debian unstable though.

Gentoo usually builds everything from source.  But,
in some instances that can't be done like for instance
IBM's JDK or Sun's JDK because there's only a binary
package.  The day JDK 1.4 was released in a non-beta
version I was able to "emerge" it under Gentoo.  
That's cool!  :)  In this particular instance, you 
have to download the installation file yourself but
it will go through the process of making it a Gentoo
installed package so that you can later uninstall it
trivially.

Maybe I didn't give Debian a fair enough chance
but I've been very happy with Gentoo.  The actual
Gentoo experience might be more in line with Debian
Unstable which I never tried so I can't compare.  I
just didn't like the word Unstable in it.  :)  Gentoo
has the concept of unstable too.  For instance, I'm
running the most recent KDE2 but I could also be
trying out KDE3 beta if I wanted (which I don't.)

If you have a spare box lying around you should give
it a whirl.  I've been very happy.  Hopefully you
will be too! :)

In case anyone wants to know:

http://www.gentoo.org

ISOs at:
  http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/snapshots/build/

  build-ix86-1.0_rc6-r16.iso      15-Feb-2002 17:14  16.9M  

Yes that's right, 16.9MB for an ISO!!!  :)

-- 
jonathan rippy