On Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:03:47 -0600 John <irgu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi folks, > > I've been using linux for about 12 years now, but only used DE's. > I've got ADD in the extreme and have poor memory retention so trying > to learn things 'UNIX' (command line and such) is just too difficult > for me. I can do some command line stuff but nothing more than > getting time from someplace to make my clock be correct, heh.
Gentoo is relatively high-maintainance, and you'll find yourself typing at a command line quite a bit. But Gentoo's documentation is very good, so if you forget what you need to do, you can just look it up again. Or ask here -- very good answers are usually quick to come. > I'm dirt-poor and have only a dial-up connection. The Portage > package management seems extremely nice, but will it be a problem for > me to upgrade say just one package/app at a time? Will I be able to > find a tarball of an app I want to try out and be able to build it > like I would with rpmbuild (will it be as relatively easy as that)? > Is there a 'repository' of apps anywhere that I can go to to look and > see if the app I normally use for something is there? I've run Gentoo on a machine with dial-up. I wouldn't do it again. Gentoo's rolling release system means IMHO the only sane way to maintain it is to keep it up to date, which means a lot of downloading. It's possible to have portage generate a list of the files it wants, take that list to another machine, feed it to some download manager, then take the files back to the Gentoo machine. > There's probably more questions, but I best keep this short for > now, lol. Thanks for any replies and help with these things and I > hope I made enough sense for everyone to understand what I'm trying > to get at. I think you were plenty clear, and I wish you luck. :)