After about a year of using Gentoo, I am very pleased. Not being a programmer, I do tend to spend alot of time on that learning curve. It has become more and more apparent in the past couple of months that USE flags really *are* as fantastic as they are cracked up to be, in at least one way---they enable the tuning of each package within whatever parameters are available for that package. Nothing even close to that is available on other distros I have used (well, slackware had at least emacs-nox, I guess).
Like my 4 year old son, I learn about the system by pounding on keys. I have always tended to tank up on caffeine before an install session, and install everything I can get my hands on. Some of them wouldn't work, but that was just, as I understood, the law of probability in action. I have been getting wiser and wiser at fixing broken merges, and often it has required to take some time, read the output, and reinstall some dependency with a USE flag enabled or disabled. I have been learning to take it slow in installing packages, check out the situation before doing the actual merge itself. This is just as important as the docs said, despite my hurly burly approach. I have had it in mind to post about this, but now I think I have a suggestion that may be useful: I wiki about USE flags would be extremely useful. Am I the only one, or are newbies the only ones who encounter USE flags with cryptic significance? The descriptions from euse, profuse, etc., are a bit of a help alot of the time; however, some use flags would bear some serious explanation! Is something now available that would provide this functionality? I am not wise to the world of wikis (my sole attempt to edit wikipedia was a dismal failture, even though I am pretty literate in LaTeX); however I would be willing to put something simple together with some help. Alan -- Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-670-256-2043 I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. --------Richard Stallman