Hi, I have been playing with redhat since 6.0 on different machines. I made the step to gentoo when I heard about it, and started with 1.4 rc1. I ran it on a pII 366 toshiba 4080xcdt with 196 mb and Gentoo runs a lot faster than RedHat. The source thing made a lot of difference, but since I was used to rpm's and stuff, and compiling from source was not something I knew, I noticed that even from following the install instructions on gentoo, I learned a lot more in 2 days then in 3 years of on and off with redhat. The biggest thing about Gentoo I like is the dependencies. On redhat, my startup page in netscape was www.rpmfind.net, because everytime I wanted to install something, I needed to find the dependencies on my own. Also got sick of missing perticulair libs so I did a full install of every redhat to have the whining of dependencies filled as much as possible. I loved the LINUXCONF on redhat and when I had gentoo up and running, I looked for a way to make that work. I tried, and gave up. configuring manualy is maybe less convenient, but it works a lot better. I thought of myself using redhat for a few years as a middle knowledge linux guy, but with gentoo I realized I was a complete noop about it. Now I am a little bit more then a newbie, but NOW I know how to figure things out instead of just installing every rpm that might work. I know where to look on my system.
> > 1) How complete is the set of ebuilds? Gentoo has the portage tree on your system, and I found a lot of replacements for programs I was used to on redhat. Every one of them actualy works better. When I am looking for something, instead of looking on Google, Freshmeat and Sourceforge, I look in Portage first. > 2) How quickly do ebuilds follow new code releases? Ebuilds are out very fast if you run the unstable arch. Found the xfree 4.3.00 yesterday in portage, and it's been out for about 2 days. Ebuilds for small stuff are usualy within a day, and the bigger, well, the stuff nees to be compiled from source, so count on something like "release + 2 times the compile time for the software" Software is usualy faster in my portage then that I find out that it's actuay out, lol > > 3) One thing I like about Debian's apt-get is that once you have Debian > installed, you can upgrade to new versions without having to reinstall. This > is in contrast to RPM distros. If I have RedHat 7.3, the best way to move to > 8.0 is to backup my data, wipe the disk and reinstall. > Is Gentoo like Debian in this respect? the iso image releases are just snapshots at a certain point of time based on stable. During installation you will automaticaly get the "latest Gentoo" even when you run 1.2, after an emerge sync and an emerge -u world, you are running the latest Gentoo. > > 4) How easy is it to create my own ebuilds? I often like to install from > source, but I'd like to keep the benefits of package management. Havent tried yet. If I want something, I can just compile from source. If there is an ebuild, I just emerge it again if needed. > > 5) Is Gentoo really that much faster? Will it make a greater difference on an For me, yes. I changed operatingsystems quite a bit due to my anoyances and addiction of messing around, but since I have had Gentoo running once, no other OS comes close. On the pII 366 196mb, gentoo and fluxbox just fly. I tried win95, 98, xp, RH 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 afterwards on the same machine, but they never last longer than a few days. Only thing that comes close to performance on this machine is Win NT 4 (bootup with 20 mb in use in graphical enviroment) > old computer (think P133) or on a new computer (think Athlon XP/MP)? > > Thanks for the help. I am very interested in Gentoo, and any information would > be much appreciated. > > -- > Daniel Carrera > Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept. > University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137 > > -- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
