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electroman6913
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Joined: 28 May 2012
Posts: 1
Location: USA Wisconsin

PostPosted: Mon May 28, 2012 5:55 am    Post subject: New Member Reply with quote

Just joined the community. I haven't installed Gentoo yet. Trying to get a peek at the system and the community.
I am currently using Arch Linux. I've found that after installing Arch and tweaking it they way I want it gets kind of boring unless there is some thing you have to compile.
I want some thing that I always get to mess with.
I want to dual boot my computer with Arch and Gentoo so I have a stable system and one to play with.
Thanks in advance for all the questions I will be asking in the future.
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Kollin
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Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 1139
Location: Sofia/Bulgaria

PostPosted: Mon May 28, 2012 8:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Welcome and happy tweaking :D
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dol-sen
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Joined: 30 Jun 2002
Posts: 2805
Location: Richmond, BC, Canada

PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2012 2:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, there aren't any other linux distributions that let you tweak any more then Gentoo (Leaving LFS out) :)
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steveL
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Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery

PostPosted: Tue May 29, 2012 5:33 pm    Post subject: Re: New Member Reply with quote

Welcome to the forums electroman.
electroman6913 wrote:
I am currently using Arch Linux. I've found that after installing Arch and tweaking it they way I want it gets kind of boring unless there is some thing you have to compile.
I want some thing that I always get to mess with.

Well since everything on Gentoo is compiled, you can mess about with anything and everything you want. It's also a really reliable platform ime; yes you might occasionally get things refusing to build, but you can usually just leave updating them til a new revision, or another version, is pushed. Actual problems that stop you booting are rare, and you usually get a heads-up from news items, or forums and IRC. It pays not to run unstable across the board, so your base system components are reliable. Then you unmask whatever you're interested in, and are prepared to deal with breaking.

The best part is that Gentoo makes it so easy to get involved with the code, since you always have the source packages from upstream, and headers are always included. Gentoo makes a lovely development box for that reason (especially when you consider how easy it is to make an ebuild for your project so it's easy to try different versions etc.) and it's also easy to experiment with new versions of gcc etc, while keeping your system compiler stable.
Quote:
I want to dual boot my computer with Arch and Gentoo so I have a stable system and one to play with.

Good luck: make sure you read the handbook over a couple of times before you install. And login to #gentoo on irc.freenode.org, and #gentoo-chat to see the more social side.
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gemarcano
Tux's lil' helper
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Joined: 04 Jun 2012
Posts: 100
Location: California

PostPosted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 9:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Trust me, there will ALWAYS be something to do on Gentoo, lol. Installing it is quite interesting, although after the second time through things start to make sense. After that, it's a world of "interesting" adventure 8) . Yes, you will eventually hit a wall in that you can no longer optimize anything else with your use flags and cflags (rather quickly, actually), but that's when all of a sudden one of your programs segfaults, and as you fix that issue, an emerge -u fails, and when you fix that, some library starts doing weird things, and then when all is fixed, you install a new program and the vicious cycle repeats, :lol:. If you REALLY get that bored, try to optimize and trim your kernel down as small as it can go while still working on your system. In summary, there will always be something to do. The question is, do you have the time and patience (mostly time) do deal with that? I find all of this fun. Maybe I'm a masochist...?
That being said, I'm running on keyword ~x86, which is for the bleeding edge (I tend to cut myself with it rather often). Perhaps things are simpler in the stable branch?

If you choose to install Gentoo, esp. for tinkering around with it, I think you'll enjoy it :D
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