[ snips ] On Mon, 13 May 2002 07:19:36 -0400 dep <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > begin Collins's quote:
> > | What you want is gentoo - onetime pain (compiles, compiles), > | lifetime gain. gentoo is (mostly) LSB compatible, very current > | (or even bleeding edge, if you choose), and it only takes a few > | hours a week to stay current. > > when did it become lsb-compliant? it certainly isn't fhs-compliant. > probably my lone objection to it is that it reinvents so much stuff > that shouldn't have been invented in the first place. otherwise, > youbetcha, that would be a route to go, especially on machines that > run current boxed distros too slowly to be of much use. (this came > up in my little first review of suse 8.0 on the site -- someone > commented that very thing.) > The intent is to be fhs-compliant; I got the wrong acronym. > the beauty -- one of the beauties -- of 2.4 was that it was easily > manageable without being authoritarian. you could decide what *you* > wanted to do and then easily figure out how to do it. it was > friendly both to novices and to those who would fire up a text > editor to edit the stuff in /etc. and it managed to painlessly teach > users linux along the way. it additionally provided > industrial-strength stability, ease of upgrading using standard > tools -- skills learned with it would transfer in large measure to > other distros -- and was better than any distribution i've ever seen > in getting the user comfortable, even fluent, with the system. > > i'm thinking less a retro distribution than the distribution that > caldera would ship today if they hadn't gone in the direction they > have. i do not begrudge their having done what they believe they > have had to do, even though i disagree with it. but due to those > decisions, i find i'm left without a distribution that makes me > happy.... I, too, used 2.4 and liked it. Caldera was the first distro I could actually get installed on my older PC, so I still have a warm fuzzy feeling about the distro. What I meant by "retro" was simply the attempt to return to a nostalgic past when present day has moved on. gentoo is still a work in progress, but it is moving rapidly toward most of your preference points. 1) I believe it is possible to build an industrial strength system now using gentoo, but the methods are still beyond many but not all newbies. A great many newbies have jumped on board and made the transition with only a small amount of hand-holding. 2) I'm not too sure about the "painlessly teach users linux along the way" or "skills learned ... would transfer .." with respect to 2.4. One of the first painful lessons I learned was that Caldera's filesystem structure was different and that, therefore, RPMs created for other distros (notably RedHat, of course) would not work without major surgery. I'm pretty sure that many of the skills I've learned using gentoo (familiarity with the standard tarball approach to package installation, comes to mind, or the need to understand individual configuration files) are applicable to any distro. 3) "Ease of upgrading using standard tools". For 2.4 unfortunately the standard tool was there but the standard approach was not (see above: RPM), and many people on this list have complained bitterly about the "ease of upgrading" or lack thereof. 4) The "non-standard" features on gentoo boil down to three basics: the portage package manager, install from sources, and the init scripts system. Perhaps these are just "standards" waiting to happen. Prior to about six months ago, there was no adequate documentation for any of this, but the documentation is much improved. I hapen to like the portage approach. RPM is great if you stick to RedHat (or clones), but it breaks down rapidly for so-called "standard" distros that don't really adhere to the same standard. I also happen to like the new approach to init scripts. True, this is not directly applicable to other distros. Use of (and occasionally debugging of) portage installs leads you to a better understanding of the basic tarball approach which is the "standard" way of installing most software packages, and this is applicable to any distro. 5) I used to be a Caldera biggot, but now I'm a gentoo biggot. I've learned more skills (most of which are generic) since moving up to gentoo than at any time in the past. Also, I have a more stable and more easily upgradable system than I ever had with Caldera 2.4 Happy nostalgia, -- Collins Richey - Denver Area - WWTLRD? gentoo(since 01/01/01) 2.4.19+(ext3) xfce-sylpheed-mozilla _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
