My experience with Gentoo

[Kevlar]

I started out in Linux with RedHat (back in the 5.1 days) and then moved to Mandrake (I loved the cutting edge stuff and the fact that it detected hardware so well). Well, after awhile, I grew dissatisfied with them because of rpm problems. Always having to track down this or that dependancy. Not a lot of fun. Plus they always installed a bunch of stuff I never wanted. Mandrake also had a tendancy to have some things that were just broken. So, while I generally enjoyed linux, I felt it was time to move on.

I tried Debian and just couldn't get into it. Then I found Gentoo. I tried it out (back just before 1.0 came out) and had a few problems that I couldn't solve. Most of them were related to some kernel compilation problems. I learned more about linux in one week with Gentoo than I did in a couple of years with Mandrake. However, my problems were to great to ignore and I switched back to Mandrake to let Gentoo mature a bit more.

This past weekend I decided to give it a go again and am happy to report that this is being posted with Konqueror in Gentoo Linux. My earlier kernel compilation problems have either been solved or I just did it right this time. Either way it works and I am loving it. Currently emerging Mozilla and then Galeon so I can have my browser of choice.

Other distributions just haven't felt quite right. So far, Gentoo feels like home. These forums are a big plus as well. I was having a grub installation problem that I was able to solve by searching the forums. Due to the way the cables in my computer route best, my cdrom is primary ide master and my main hard drive is primary ide slave. Not knowing that grub ignores cdroms, I kept trying to use hd1 instead of the proper hd0 for my hard drive. The forums provided the answer I needed and in short order my Win2k/Gentoo Linux system was booting up properly.

I know this has been long, but a big thanks to the Gentoo people. You have a great distribution.
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