Gentoo Addictions

truc · Advocate Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 3199

I might be affected too :wink:

oggialli · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 12:44 am Post subject:

Heck, I have some similar symptoms too. My addiction is mostly centered around GUI tinkering - I switch WM's and DE's all the time "to try something different" if only to return to the thing I was using a week ago. I never seem to be satisfied, though in the process I have got proficient with many different types of GUI's all the way from FVWM (which I used for a while... up until last week, before that E DR17 for a few months) to KDE (which I'm using ATM). I also tend to go through the same kde-look and deviantart top favs up to a few times a week looking for "a new wallpaper to make my life better" or something.

But above all I'm addicted to reading forum posts - at a time I usually have a set of 2-3 forums I visit. Currently that means Gentoo Forums, gamedev.net Community Discussion and a Finnish forum called MuroBBS. I spend like ~5-10 hours a week just busyloop-polling the forums for new posts to crunch

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omp · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 1:42 am Post subject:

Taladar · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 3:16 am Post subject:

Don't worry. I had that about a year ago. It gets old after a few months.

Just try to solve the problem of proving to others that you can use Gentoo without putting much time into it.

coriolan · Apprentice Joined: 21 Apr 2005 Posts: 273

We must establish a Gentooists Anynomymous, the purpose of which is to ...... get more people addicted to Gentoo.

brims · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2004 Posts: 492 Location: Arizona

Ya, I would like to start on the 12 step program to get off my addiction. Will we get tokens like the AA guys get?
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loki99 · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 9:51 am Post subject:

My name is loki99 and I am a Gentooholic!

Luckily, I already have been through this before and I mangeded to find a way to handle my addiction in a socialy acceptable manner. Only once in a while the urge gets stronger and I fall back into my old habits though. :roll:

Rhiakath · Guru Joined: 10 Feb 2006 Posts: 572 Location: Hell...

Hi there.
I've tried installing Gentoo about August 2005, and failed miserably... for about five times.... I couldn't even get to the prompt after rebooting... (Hey, go easy on me.. I hadn't touched linux for seven years..)

I tried again over December. Got it working. Got it tweaked. tweaked the hell out of it. made it completely unusable with all the experiments. Then i reinstalled. and done everything all over again.

Then, it struck me. Why the hell did I just reinstall Gentoo 12 times in 3 months???? And, the strange part is, i love every command of the installation. Why is a freaking huge, complex, strange installation so loveable?????? Why is this an addiction???? I just installed gentoo in 4 computers over this past weekend, and I'm just reinstalling it on my home pc (writing this on the laptop).
Is there some kind of virus affecting users during the installation? How come I now depend on a Gentoo installation to be happy? I even wrote a couple of scripts so it would be faster, but that just takes the fun out of it... I see about 10 zillion lines pass on the screen, and in the end, it reboots, and works like a charm.... What's fun about that??????

On the other hand, the alternative is awful. Booting into... errrm.... into.... well..... you know.... that other so-called OS (Microsoft's "best bug collection" XP) is just... uhhh... ok, bad (hey, I'm trying to be polite...

)

Has anyone fallen in love with gentoo's installation and tweaking phase, just as I did???
Or am I the only freak????

Oh, and I gotta thank someone for this. Dunno who, but I thank the Gentoo Developers for showing us, users, what a real OS is like.If you wanna be treated like a 2-year-old, stupid, completely dumb kid (read : ameba) then use that other thing with little icons, and wizards, and all those things, just to fry your pc. If you wanna feel the power of the dark side, then come join us.... YOU CANNOT IMAGINE THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE OF LINUX!!!!!!! It's beautiful!

Also, Thanks for all the guys in this forum, since, sincerely, you're the best. You got it all covered, since pizza how-to's , to complete samba installation, configuration, etc etc.
Thank you all.

Muitíssimo obrigado.

cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

I wouldn't call it an "addiction", but I like going through the installation process. Not so much any more since I have pretty much come up with a system and the manual went to stage3 insatlls. Most of the tweaking can take place afterwards, but some stuff like filesystems and partitioning schemes are still fun to play with. Since I have done the install so many times and different arches, I much prefer copying it from an online backup that's stored on a local server. Not to take anything from Gentoo, but if you /really/ like installations, you might want to look at doing an LFS install.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 3:06 am Post subject:

I definitely understand how you feel. My first posts to these forums were about how to install Gentoo 1.4 using dial-up. I look back at it now and it seems kind of crazy all the crap I went through trying to figure out how to do it when the wvdial included on that version of live cd was borked. Like most things linux, it was fairly simple, in hindsight. I get an itch about every two or three months and I end up wiping my drives clean and installing something else. I always end up back with Gentoo though. I guess that's about the nicest thing I could say about Gentoo.

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cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

Yeah, that kinda sparked another reason why installing is somewhat fun. Usually it's where all the errors and learning takes place for beginners. This makes it the perfect stomping ground because it's the first place that newbies will run into trouble and will have to start diagnosing problems. Just look at the post count for "Installing Gentoo" and it's pretty obvious where the headaches/learning begins.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 3:40 am Post subject:

cynric · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 439

Ah, didn't know they had that many issues with it. I've never used it myself. Its release was mentioned on the -dev mailing list and can be found here.

Jfr0 · n00b Joined: 19 Dec 2005 Posts: 72

I tried doing the amd64 gui install, but I had to go back to the tried and true handbook method with the minimal install cd. So there are some issues to be worked out. But I am sure they will be.

Chevredansante · n00b Joined: 14 Oct 2005 Posts: 47 Location: lahsa

aha. I'm sorry but the old-fashioned install is one of the reasons I like Gentoo. Other gui Linux installs ALWAYS buggered up for me. Partly because GRUB never wants to map my S-ATA harddisks; so grub-setup() fails. And then the smart gui installers just assume it worked and restarted.

With Gentoo, I got to actually map my disks myself.

I also have a lot of problems with networking installs on other distros. Gentoo always works like a Swiss clock.

... I'd never use a gui installer.

Dr.Black.85 · Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 9:37 pm Post subject:

When my main computer was on repairs (not going to be a main computer for long) I hadn't much to do because I was left with good old Compaq Armada E500 laptop (Celeron600mhz, 192mb memory, Gentoo 2005.0).

After some time I found myself in a situation of "no problems to solve" as mentioned. You should have seen me what I was doing with that poor old machine. I even could not believe what it is capable of

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Massimo B. · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 9:51 am Post subject: Gentoo at work

At my new job first I had a quickly setup debian, and it took some time and lunch breaks to build a chroot gentoo, tunelling whole portage over the local proxy, disregarding local debian mirrors and nonexistent local gentoo mirror. Finally I switched grub to that.
Other employers wouldn't even allow to setup a workstation on my own, or would even dismiss people twiddling with their OS (optimizing in my eyes :wink:

)
I'm afraid I only can be really productive with the OS of my choice. The work day begins even nice with a lila-theme booting workstation.

But in fact, I don't need to ask for a MS Office, or CAD, Visual something software bundles, I run fine with gimp, qcad, oo and eclipse.

So far about my job.
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linuxinit · Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 6:47 am Post subject:

I come from Slackware...

Anyways... I was looking for the ph one the other day and thought 'updatedb ; locate phone' just for a second.

Another thing is when I'm forced to use a Windows box I find myself going for the terminal... especially for screenshots and browsing/searching for files. I LOATHE dir... ls is just too easy. Sometimes I'll hit TAB to autocomplete when I'm not in a Terminal. I hit ctrl-alt-bspace on an XP box that froze up once. I was seething too when it didn't work.

As for Gentoo... dunno. It's still installing. :)

Chaosite · Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 7:58 pm Post subject:

Whats the use of updatedb before slocate? you might as well use find...

linuxinit · Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 8:24 pm Post subject:

Heh...

I don't use slocate, I use locate. updatedb updates the database, and locate searches it. :)

dhave · Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 8:32 pm Post subject:

linuxinit · Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 8:48 pm Post subject:

SLBMEH · Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:05 pm Post subject:

Hello Gentoo Addicts. My name is Steve. My symptoms are composed of weekly installations of Gentoo. A CD binder full of Official Releases purchased at the Gentoo store and home-brewed Live CDs for everything under the sun: World of Warcraft (Patches/data stored on usb memory stick), Unreal Tournament, Open Office, General Desktop, Automated installations for x86 x86_64 and ppc, eprom writing, firewall, web server, ventrilo server, ftp server, samba server, virus scanner which kernel can read/write fat and ntfs, and a few others that i can't recall off the top of my head...
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dhave · Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 5:19 pm Post subject: