stringchopper n00b
Joined: 07 Feb 2009 Posts: 50
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Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:20 pm Post subject: A big THANKS to youz Gentoo guyz :) |
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Ok, I'm not really from the Bronx, but whaddaya gonna do about it?
I just want to say a big Thank You to the distro maintainers, the support help here on the forums and on IRC. I've tried several distros, including Slackware, Arch Linux, and even a few of the more "user-friendly" bloatros (er, distros), and with absolutely no disrespect toward Slackware or Arch Linux, I have to say, Gentoo rocks!
I have two machines that I've been using to test distros, both about 7 years old. Recently, I gave my newer machine, an iMac, to my wife, because I figured that would help me to settle into Linux (3 years ago, I had fooled around with Linux, but moved away from it when I got the iMac - long story made short, my little affair with Apple soured).
I had a few hitches and glitches getting Gentoo installed - 1) Gnome2 didn't want to build for me, 2) Nvidia 310 drivers with the 3.7.10 Linux kernel didn't go over so well, and 3) I had aging pre-fail disks in both of my machines, which I discovered after finally getting Gentoo installed on both machines. So with those hiccups, I feel I've learned a lot already - how to mask nvidia versions, how to do a system backup and restore, using tar or dd, restoring grub or lilo, etc. I don't have Nvidia drivers installed yet, but so far Nouveau seems to be working well. I built my laptop with the 3.7.10 kernel and Nouveau built into the kernel, And I built the 3.6.11-r2 kernel on the desktop machine, using Nouveau as a module, in anticipation of a later install of the proprietary Nvidia 310.xx driver (too much on my plate right now to learn about patching the kernel, but that DOES sound like a lot of fun!)
BUT, those small problems aside, my old laptop zings now! I attribute this to three things: 1) Gentoo's compiling from source with USE flags, using the XFCE4 desktop, and the new hard drive. But even without the new hard drive, I had tried other distros on my laptop recently, and Gentoo just made ALL the difference (I had tried XFCE4 with these other distros too).
My desktop machine practically SNAPS! Just wait til I get these USE flags mastered, I'll probably be able to send an email before I type it
And the Gentoo Documentation is phenomenal - truly!
I do have to say, Portage scares me a bit. Partly because I feel I have to dedicate time to learn how to use it. But I get the feeling that it is a powerful sword, even if it feels like a machete in my hands. In reality, it serves me really well. When I was using Slackware, I always had the hardest time getting software to compile (just because I'm a newb, nothing to do with Sackware). But I really wanted software that was fine-tuned for my machine and environment. AFAIK, this isn't really possible with Slackware. And of course, Arch linux is a binary distro.
Sincerely and Best Regards,
Brian aka badavocado
Special thanks to IRC support (as best as I can recall their IRC nicknames): iamben, nawks, NP-Hardass, patagonicus42, rottingdead, TomWij
Also thanks to Pappy at kernel-seeds.org for his website with helpful hints on configuring the kernel. _________________ --
Thanks,
BP |
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