[TriLUG] OT looking for Gimp book recommendation

[Randall Barlow]

> Could you please elaborate on the benefits of Gentoo besides the fact that you 
> build it yourself? Reason I ask is a GoLUGger I know swears by Gentoo, and 
> like you, I don't think self-building is at the top of his priority list.

Hey Steve,

	I am a Gentoo user myself.  Building the system yourself can be
advantageous, but you can do that with any distro really.  One thing I
really like about Gentoo is its package management system.  The emerge
system is really nice in that it allows you full control over what
packages are installed on your system via its USE flags.  I.E., if I use
Gnome or KDE, I can set it to optimize programs for the one I use
instead of installing (and compiling) the support for the other.
	It's really a matter of how finely tuned you want your system, and how
much patience you have.  I've got an older machine (P3 800 MHz) and some
of the builds took somewhere around 36 hours to complete (OpenOffice,
Gnome...)
	I'm a relatively new Linux user too, so the Gentoo installation process
was very enlightening for me.  I learned a lot about what's under the
hood, since I had to configure some of it myself.  I used to use FC, but
I had a hard time understanding the system since a lot of the setup was
done for me with the RPM's (although, the install time is orders of
magnitude less!)
	That's my 2 cents...

Randy Barlow
rpbarlow at ncsu.edu