My play with Redhat8.0.. and back to Gentoo :)

[BradB]

Well, to set the scene I'll give a quick history - I first tried Mandrake 7.? in 1999, and wasn't impressed. Later that year I tried Mandrake 8.0 and liked it a lot. I upgraded to 8.2 at some stage and stayed with Mandrake. I did a bit of development and started learning about linux in general. I first tried Gentoo just after 1.2 came out (about June) and moved to 1.4 when the first release candidate came out. I was so impressed with Gentoo that it quickly became my primary boot OS, and became comfortable like an old shoe.

The initial system compiling (I installed 4 times, including a fresh 1.4 install) was tiresome, but at that time I was infactuated with Gentoo, so I didn't care. After some tweaking on 1.4RC I had a nice system I could do work on, and I spent less time playing with the OS and more time doing actual work (programming). About 3 weeks ago I started getting weird X problems, I would leave my computer overnight & come back to find X using 99% CPU - I also have problems with VIM taking up 99% CPU occasionally. The vim problem is easy, close my vims down & kill the remaining vim processes. Fixing X was a bit more of a hassle - just a restart of X, but my nicely arranged windows needed to be closed & reopened.

The simple solution is to recompile X, I tried a lot of optimisation settings in my wild days, and maybe something was screwy there, but that made me think perhaps it was a lib that X relied upon that was screwy. Hmm, perhaps emerge -e xfree is more appropriate. That sounded like a lot of compiling. It was about now that I thought "maybe my 800MHz Athlon should be running a binary distro".

So I looked around, Debian's apt-get sounded sweet. Roll off to work and burn a Debian CD. Installed quite painlessly, but lost points for not bringing up X using the framebuffer (it crashed) and boy was it slow. In short, I missed the newer packages of Gentoo.

So try Redhat8.0, a later distro, and I figure it has apt-rpm that I might like. Redhat lost points because its installer borked on the zlib rpm package, even though it would install it properly when doing a minimal install. When I finally got it going it was nice, but apt-rpm had a small repositry and it crashed the second time I used it. Not a good look. Also KDE was slower.

If you noticed above, I was trying to keep portage with a binary distro via apt-get/apt-rpm - guess I'm a portage addict now, and I don't think apt is a good enough substitute.

Last night after about 4 days of attempted Redhat/Debian installing I booted into Gentoo - it was like coming home again. I bit the bullet and started my

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emerge -e system; emerge -e world

in tty1 and killed X, give every cycle I can to the compile effort

There are some things I don't like about compiling from scratch, like if I want something NOW, I need to DL it and wait for the compile. But Gentoo's pluses totally outweigh this minus. I'm going to aquire an older P2 laptop soon, Gentoo will be the only OS on it & I intend to use my desktop box with distcc to help me compile. I'm afraid that all my base is belonging to Gentoo, and I like it.

Hmm, maybe this should be in Praise!

Brad

[charlieg]

I wonder if you're still a portage addict.

[BradB]

Yup

Starting to play with 2.6 when I have time.