My linux/gentoo story

[bladdo]

So anyway this is going to be my 200th post ( wohoo ) so I wanted to tell my story of linux and my experience with it. And show my aprriciaton to gentoo.

I first started to use linux at the beginning of last summer. My brother said I should try it out and I was programming PERL alot at the time and running a perl aim bot named Tiny Tiny Bot ( which I still run) so I decided to switch over. He gave me a basic slackware LILO , KDE install. I was very impressed but when ever I had a problem I would have to call him over to fix it . After a while of learning the basic bash commands - mount , ls, etc......... I relized alot of my computers devices werent functional , mainly my DVD drive not recognized problem was bothering me. By now it was getting to mid-late summer. I looked for a new distro on which I would learn everything on my own.

A google search revealed gentoo to me. I read the Larry the Cow story and was inspired . I printed out all the gentoo documentation and burned gentoo 2004.3 ( i believe). Took me about 3 times to install it and lots of dumb posts on these forums which I relize how obvious they were to solve now . I have been using gentoo ever since. Today I am an semi-experienced linux user.I would just like to thanks all the gentoo developers and all the people who have helped me on my questions on this forum. Soon I will figure out a way to give back to the gentoo community, I just havn't figured it out yet .

Thanks everyone,

[200th post, YAY ]
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Bladdo formerly >Milo<
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Creator of AIM Bot: Tiny Tiny Bot - the bot that learns
distro: gentoo | window manager: pekwm

[elvisthedj]

How lucky am I to be able to reply to your 200th post!

I just wanted to say as far as my experience goes, the big thing that has kept me loyal to Gentoo is the fact that I have learned so much more with this distro. I tried quite a few, but with Gentoo I've been able to really understand more about what goes on behind the scenes. (especially during the install )

Anyway, I don't see myself changing distros anytime soon, but I can't imagine what I'll ever give back to the "Gentoo Community" .. sans replies to 200th posts

[madchaz]

Nice story

For me, gentoo is likely to be what will finaly get me out of this job into a more interesting one.

I started with gentoo about 2 years ago. At the time, I had mandrake 8.2 running samba and apache. I was happy with it but got frustrated very fast when I tried to do more. A friend of mine at work kept buging me to try gentoo and I finaly gave in. Best move I ever made, even if I started at exactly the wrong time.

Right in the midle of my very first install of 1.4, I get to "run emerge sync" and it won't work. For those who were here back then, I started on the exact day a problem caused the entire portage tree to get deleted on the mirrors. This was a MAJOR issue, as you can guess. But what impressed me was how fast users got notified on the main website (inside 30 minutes of the problem being reported on the forum) and how fast it was fixed.

So something like 10 tries later, I finaly got it installed and working (I was a lot more of a linux newbee then I had expected, plus it was a litle harder back then )

That's when I realised how worth it it had been to stick with it. At this point I figured if installing the BASE system had been that hard, the rest was going to be even worst. How wrong I was. From that point on, everything was so easy I felt like crying. Where Mandrake had an easy install and was hell to manage, gentoo had a hard install but was so easy to manage it was like going back to windows ... just with stability, power, flexibility and no licence fee.

I decided to re-do the install, just to be 100% sure I could get it done. Soon, I could do it almost with my eyes closed.

2 years later, I'm now starting a linux interest group at work and I am probably going to end up moving to a new job managing an entire park of only linux machines for a school here. I don't have a clue what the environment will look like,
but my hope is that it's a total mess so I can get a project going to switch it all to gentoo
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[defkewl]

Same here. It took me three times to install Gentoo too.
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[krazykit]

You printed out the documentation? ALL of it? I managed to get it right on the second time... to be fair, the first time I was trying to install it on an external hard drive, which was just a mess.

[KezzerDrix]

YEa, I printed it too, all 96 pages, I am on my second try.
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[bladdo]

[electrofreak]

no need to print it out... just remember the first few things... then use links to read the documentation as you install (in another terminal).

Or... if you have another computer, such as a laptop, just use that... or if you're really patient at reading things on a PDA... go for it...

[wjholden]

I printed out my documentation and I was glad I did. Half the pages were covered in notes I had written about what USE flags to use, diagrams of my filesystem, the syntax for commands I always forget, reminders to change the permissions on something or the other, what groups to put my user account in to be really useful, what packages to merge once I was done, URIs of important forum posts, things to watch out for, where I went wrong on the last try, etc. So what if something else breaks once a month -- that's one more piece of software for me to master when it breaks and I get to go fix. Some people would be upset by this, but I can only blame myself for being a shameless ricer

[djdunn]

The most important thing imho about any distro is the community involvement. I'm quite fond of the gentoo developer system. They are always around helping us and more importantly teaching us. at least for me its a great satsifaction.
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[numerodix]

[weirdo]

So much nostalgia. I started out in 2002 with 1.0 I believe. Got it working the first time because I followed every single line of the instuction which at the time were not nearly as good as today's and I also had 2 years of other distro experience.I feel like a tree killer because I still print out the instuction.

Today I use Gentoo to give tutorials on everything linux at my school. The reason I use it for tutorial is because by having students see an install they can see most of the most important config file in a linux system. Know about the most important packages in linux and become familiar with a package management system that is really powerfull.

I can't stop using gentoo mainly because now my system is exactly as I want it and I never attained this level of personalisation with other distros. I understand more about it than Red Hat , Debian or Mandriva(Mandrake renamed with stupid name).

Anyways all my thanks to the gentoo forum for useful help. I which I would give back as much in help but I just don't browse the forums enough.

Nic

[Sanome]