Reasons why I love Gentoo ...

Guest · Posted: Thu May 16, 2002 2:19 am Post subject: Reasons why I love Gentoo ...

RedHat: Bloated ...
Debian: Outdated ...
Mandrake: Ugly ...
Corel: Dead ...
Slackware: Close but not cigar ...
Linux From Scratch: Too time consuming ...
Gentoo: Da man !!!

I was a big Debian groupy until I got a clue that it's WAAAY behind. Then I tried Slackware and was impressed with the easy installation and relatively up to date software. Then I tried Gentoo and said to myself, wow, finally a Linux distro that is intuitive and up to date.

See me, I'm all about the newest kernels and software. Gentoo has to be the most up to date distro I've encountered. Props to KDE3 as well. I'm just loving this desktop environment! Sorry GNOME, you've got some serious catching up to do.

Well, just want to say thanks to the Gentoo developers and keep up the hard work, it is much appreciated.

TheWart · Posted: Thu May 16, 2002 5:16 am Post subject:

Yea, I could not have put it into better words myself! Great job guys!
_________________
Face it, we are all noobs.

On the box it said it was designed for Win XP or better, so why won't it work with Linux?

nickperry · Posted: Sun May 19, 2002 4:19 pm Post subject: Love it

Have been using Redhat for the past year or so, but didn't really like it and wanted something new. I'd seen gentoo on distrowatch and kerneltrap.org and thought I'd give it a go. After some initial fun getting my pcmcia and usb tweaked, it's nothing short of AWESOME. The speed difference over Redhat is very noticable and XFS is sweet. I had been worried about the time to grab source and how well Portage would work through our http proxy but no problems, I've had speeds of 500k/s. Compilation can get a bit boring to watch after a while, but it's a good oportunity to get a bit of work done and stop playing for a couple of hours

. Oh btw, I'm running Gentoo on my IBM Thinkpad T20 with a 3com 3c575cb nic and everything works perfectly, actually better than under Redhat 7.2. Any questions / problems getting set up on a Thinkpad, let me know and I'll see if I can help.

Thanks Gentoo!

Nygard · n00b Joined: 27 Apr 2002 Posts: 8

OK, no doubt that portage is fantastic. But there's more to like here than just portage.

It's a very modern distro. Consider:

devfs right off the bat.
Latest kernel version. (Ever try using Redhat's RPMs to upgrade the kernel? Ish.)
java-config is what Sun should have done. No more CLASSPATH bullshit.
env-update - excellent control
rc-update - Way better than the SysV runlevels that everyone else is still stuck on

There are others that I just can't think of right now.

athlonkmf · n00b Joined: 02 Jun 2002 Posts: 37

I was a redhat user before, so you can call me a newbie

I've also tried debian at work, great package system, but too tough to install, because there's no good documentation/walkthrough.
I've tried Mandrake. Easiest install ever, but bloated.

And now, i've spend a week to install and try gentoo on my workstation. Loved it. The install is just as "tough" as Debian, but the walkthrough is so great that a "newbie" as I am, could handle it easily. (BTW, you guys should really put an warning on the grub-install part. If you use a timeout of 1 second, the kernel doesn't load or something... I recompiled it like 4-5 times before I find out it was grub...).
Even got sound on the first try

Which had never happened before, even with mandrake

And of course, emerge is a great system. Almost as good as dselect/apt-get. Just missing a good/fast search system. Emerge search works ok, but it takes forever to find something. It'd be easier if there was simply a list for emerge to search though.

Anyway. I was so happy with gentoo, i've kicked redhat out of my P166-server and put gentoo on it. Quite a hassle, i've compiled/emerged everything on my athlon-workstation with pentium-classic options and put it back in the server.
Now it runs faster than my 266Mhz win98 laptop

And of course waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy faster than Redhat.

It's gentoo all the way. I think I'm gonna mod my servercase with the Gentoo logo :lol:

ps> some more suggestion about the walktrough/installguide. It might be better to let people create some partitions for /home and /var. Otherwise it'd be really easy to fill the var-dir with emerge-tmpfiles.....

Also, it'd be great if emerge had an option of deleting downloaded and merged source files. And deletes tmp-files automaticly after install. otherwise it's just a waste of space.

And a more automated install would be nice too :wink: