Initial Experiences with Gentoo

[RatX]

Greetings Fast Little Penguin Fans!

Being a relative Linux newbie, it's taken me a day or three to finally get my Gentoo box off the ground. I installed from the "big" 1.1a ISO and used the stage 3 tarball (you've got to start somewhere). All I can say is that Gentoo rocks! I love the fact that you get to see behind-the-scenes during the install, rather than having everything hidden behind some fat GUI.

Also, Portage works like a charm - I just need to spend some time to get familiar with the fiddly bits as well as starting and stopping servers (rc.what?!?). For me, this is the primary differentiator between Gentoo and the other distros I've tried (Redhat, Mandrake, Corel). It enables you to select with a high degree of precision what you want on your box. It's also easy to keep up-to-date and you don't have to get stuck in RPM / building-from-source dependancy hell.

I installed on a spare IBM Netfinity 3000 with 9GB SCSI drive and onboard eepro100 Ethernet (PIII 700 with 128 MB RAM). I installed several times in a row - the first time I forgot to build necessary SCSI modules into the kernel, then I botched up GRUB configuration and so it went. A good few of the installs were due to "emerge rsync" troubles - I'm behind a layer of proxies and firewalls. I thought the install was b0rk3 when it wouldn't work, so I would re-install and get to the same point. Nothing like banging your head against a brick wall in an attempt to get through it when there's a wide open door just a few meters to your left...

It would be good if a bit of attention was paid to this fact in the initial build doc - how to download and extract the daily tarball to get the same effect as "emerge rsync" - that is what it does, isn't it? When I find my way around these forums I'll see if I can let somebody know about that. Haven't managed to do an emerge update yet, but will get there at some stage.

The plans for the box are as follows (after a RAM boost and addition of backup mechanism):

- replace local office Intranet server (currently running Apache 1.3 under NT server on identical machine with PHP and MySQL bits). Going to replicate under Gentoo and see what kind of mileage results.

- host Squid proxy with NT authentication, talking to 2 x upstream proxies. This will spare up some of our limited bandwidth for my Gentoo updates and provide me with a bit of control over what's coming onto my network.

- host SMTP/IMAP mail servers to replace current Win32 Mercury implementation. If this goes well, I might be given the opportunity of setting a box up in company's other offices. After scratching about on the web, Postfix and courier IMAP seem like a likely pair to offer that service. Any thoughts?

- SAMBA sharing to be able to dump files into webroot from WinNT w/s's.

Will see how things go and keep you posted.

Thanks for a great product.
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I have no idea what's going on right now...

[klieber]