Hi Tony, Blindraven wrote: .. snip ..
> Just a heads up to everyone who has been replying to me re: my Gentoo post, > and in general because it keeps occurring. If you forget to hit reply all > you are sending emails directly to the person and not the list. The whole > purpose of the list is that everyone gets to read through, share their > opinions and people can kind of sift through stuff and hopefully find > something that is useful to them, I know I have on many occasions. > > What actually led me to this email was the pure extensiveness and effort > that has gone in to the replies I have received. Not only do these people > miss out on the unsaid list credit of helping, others will miss out on the > help I was lucky enough to receive. > > I'm ranting, in short.* Reply All. ..snip.. I'm guessing people avoided replying to all to avoid one of these http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-231240.html by not offending Gentoo and non-Gentoo distro users. I'm of similar experience to yourself and got put into the deep end when I had to maintain and then upgrade/recreate a Gentoo server. You could install it with UML (user-mode-linux) on your Ubuntu system to start off with to begin with as it will make you famliar with install procedure. My best advice to you is to go at Gentoo alone and follow their wonderful documentation , Stage3 install, http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/ by meticulously reading through every line of it to get your system installed and up and running to experience what Gentoo is truly about. This process can be considered a wonderful learning process which makes you more intimate with the workings of Linux system with many hours of compiling.... or a pain staking process which is filled with annoying gotcha's, many hours of What/Where-TF? and tedious hours of compiling. My experience was half way in between, YMMV. ;) Make sure you read "Working with Portage" section of the handbook to get your head around the package management system. Eventually you'll end up spending a lot of your time lurking in this forum Portage & Programming http://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum-f-8.html?sid=2e886ee6b2040aafb246c6036b26919b The support forums for Gentoo are amazing being on par with, maybe slightly better that Ubuntu's. Gentoo taught me a lot in regards to Systems Administration * Package upgrades need to be well planned, tested on dummy systems, will most likely require downtime and require a rollback solution * Read the release notes for the software packages you are looking to upgrade (e.g. Samba, Apache) as old configuration files may not work with the new software * Package/Build servers are a great option if you are looking to maintain the performance and uptime of live machines. As a Debian/Ubuntu user (Desktop/laptop) I now run a gentoo server at home as it makes me go about things the hard way (I feel) and makes me very aware of any discrepancies I haven't taken into account. I (and you might of) had the impression that Gentoo was running all of the latest software compared to the ancient Debian and not quite so ancient Ubuntu... this is not the case as the latest version of certain software can be masked, listed but kind of unavailable for Ubuntu users mindsets, due to bugs and incomplete testing so you still may have the feeling that you are being held back somewhat by the distribution. Your better off learning how to build your own packages/repositories and working them into the distribution rather than changing distro's. This has made appreciate Ubuntu's and especially Debian's packaging time lines as I will know what I'm getting has a very good chance of working together with everything else. -- Steve ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
