Ryan Bowman wrote:
If my ntfs resizing problems go away, then I should have lots of space on my primary hard drive. After last nights meeting and the ensuing push for everyone to use Gentoo, i am again considering running it. So I ask, keeping in mind I have installed it before, so i know I can but didn't use it over the summer because all I did was play my expensive Windows games, what reasons drive you personally to run, or NOT to run, Gentoo?
This is a little old, when I was first trying Gentoo, but here's a snip of what I wrote:
http://blog.nephi.org/gentoo.php
Why Gentoo?
That's a good question, considering this is not the user-friendly Linux build you're proably looking for if you're the type of person who actually reads documentation.
My person reason for wanting to try Gentoo was based on a couple of reasons -- for one, I was getting tired of the RPM trap. Basically, if you're going to setup a Linux system, it seems to me that you need to decide beforehand if you're going to be installing the packages straight from the source (tarballs) or use RPMs. Because you can't do both. Well, you can, but not consistently. Well, you can, but it gets messy because of rpm dependencies and the like.
I only came to that conclusion after going through a number of Linux builds and tinkering with them (specifically, Red Hat 5.2, 6.1., 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9, Mandrake 7.2, 8.0 and 9.1) and the more I learned the more I realized I wanted a bit more configurability.
Gentoo offers that, and also a nice package dependency system, that uses the source tarballs instead of RPMs. Larry the Cow explains it much better than I do.
</snip>
Today, though, I'm tired of Gentoo. I tried it on my server, and it would crash randomly. I had to give up on it there because I couldn't figure out why it was doing it, so I put Debian on there.
For my desktop, I use Mandrake, since when KDE 3.1.3 came out, I didn't feel like waiting another 17 hours to compile it.
Aside from that, a few reasons to install Gentoo:
- huge package selection (emerge is great, and you can browse /usr/portage/distfiles for a tiny look at what there is)
- great community (forums.gentoo.org)
- quick bugfixes to most problems you find in packages
Gentoo is a great distro, but I have to wonder how long the excitement and giddiness in the community is going to last. I say that because Gentoo's idea is a good one, well implemented, and very popular right now ... but Gentoo is a fun challenge to install Linux more than it is a stable distribution.
When I heard about it, I tried it, I spent six months tweaking, installing, playing, and pulling out my hair to get that little gold shiny star that says "I installed Gentoo!" But then the novelty wore off. Specifically, when I wanted to do a huge upgrade and didn't feel like leaving my computer on all night to compile KDE again.
Plus, if you're going to install Gentoo, plan on doing it once, an never taking it off. It's very time consuming to install it once, and if you do plan on maybe reinstalling again sometime, take *very* detailed notes on what you had to do to get such and such a package to work correctly.
Much to my embarrasment, here's some notes I took when I was putting Gentoo on my desktop: http://www.nephi.org/gentoo/gentoo-history
Good luck with Gentoo. It's fun to play with, and you learn so much about your system and Linux that it's pretty incredible.
Steve
____________________
BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
