Gentoo Forums

I use Gentoo & i love it.
because of many resones.
i used many distros almost 10-15 until if found out about gentoo.

I want to promote Gentoo in India.
Since many ppl over here use RH or fedora.
gentoo is much more better than that.
so i wanted some help

1. why u shifed to gentoo.
2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.
3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.
4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.

aqua26 wrote:3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.

USE flags!

CFLAGS is a close second.

aqua26 wrote:4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.

Command-line based install, for those GUI lovers.

aqua26 wrote: I want to promote Gentoo in India.
Since many ppl over here use RH or fedora.

Then you only need one argument: no more RPM nightmares

Seriously. Portage has the best package management system I've ever seen of any distribution of Linux. I use Gentoo not because of the optimizations you can make for your hardware (though I admit, that's really sexy), but because of Portage. If anything is going to get installed, I have complete control over what gets installed and what doesn't.

What this means also is that unlike Redhat or other "large" distributions, you won't get a whole bunch of useless programs you never use, and create more problems than they're worth.

The greatest strengths of Gentoo are Portage, and free-form customization. You can take a Gentoo installation LiveCD, and use it to install all the programs necessary to run as a desktop workstation (Xorg, Openoffice, Enlightenment, Gaim, etc.), and take that same cd and use it to install the programs specific for a web server (snort, PHP, Apache2, MySQL, etc.).

The best way I'd recommend spreading the knowledge of Gentoo around where you are would be by example - find what other people are doing with other distributions, and do it better with Gentoo.

I agree with stormcrowley. portage is in my view one of the greatest strengths of Gentoo, including the ability to further customise Gentoo ebuilds (in the portdir_overlay). can i just add that the gentoo community esp these forums and the available documentation and help are other great strengths of Gentoo. Many a time i have been stuck on one or other issue, searched these forums and quickly found an adequate solution to my issue. Even for a beginner, the fact that when you ask questions in this forum you actually get help and not just some snobbish RTFM is a great benefit.....
just my two pence

1. why u shifed to gentoo.
I don't. I just use it for fun. For mission critical I won't rely it on Gentoo

2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.
Yes.

3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.
It's slick and fast

4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.
The command line interface when installing

nyowe wrote:portage is in my view one of the greatest strengths of Gentoo ...

Errr. Are you sure? Have you seen apt-get or yum yet? IMHO it's gotta to be better than portage.

defkewl wrote:

nyowe wrote:portage is in my view one of the greatest strengths of Gentoo ...

Errr. Are you sure? Have you seen apt-get or yum yet? IMHO it's gotta to be better than portage.

What about USE flags? You can't choose which compiler options you will get, all the packages are precompiled with bunch of useless stuff - Portage gives you ability to control this.

1. why u shifed to gentoo.
because I was bored

2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.
nope

3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.
portage, new packages, good manuals, friendly forums

4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.
it requires ability to read

defkewl wrote:Have you seen apt-get or yum yet? IMHO it's gotta to be better than portage.

Oh... try to use yum in Fedora Core 3 without a network. The stupid, stupid, STUPID thing accesses the network to query ALL my repos for updated package lists. EVERY time. Regardless of whether it is searching for a package or installing a package.

Not to mention the work that you have to do importing repo GPG keys - how many newbies will know how to do that themselves?

Thank God for emerge --sync

Yum (at least the Fedora Core 3 incarnation) must be something the Fedora developers created to torture people who happen to still be using dialup.

i am in fact using RHEL3 on one machine.
since i am doing certification of redhat.

Keeping Redhat up2date is pain in the a**.
since there is apt-get & yum.
apt-get is ported from debain.
still it very difficult to manage it.
i still think redhat & windows have many things in common.

I am very sure that portage is the gratest power gentoo have.
& this is not the one power it has.

according to me
apt-get & yum is rated 4/10
where emerge is rated 9/10.

i wont rate emerge 10/10 coz
occasional instability and risk of breakdown.
only once there was some problem with ebuild. i can't recall what was it right now.

1. why u shifed to gentoo.

I didn't.

2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.

Used SUSE at my university.

3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.

Control. I switched from Windows to Linux because I wanted control. I was excited to use SUSE at work but was disappointed when I found 10 editors, 10 browsers, 10 this and 10 that i.e. BLOAT which was exactly what I was trying to get away from.

So I installed Gentoo and everything looked fine. Emerged KDE and guess what, it was still loaded with 1000 apps! I then realised the difference between a distro, desktop environments and window managers. Long story short, I found XFCE4, installed just what I need and now I'm a happy gentooer. That's why I chose Gentoo (and XFCE).

4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.

updating config-files after emerge. I guess. I really don't know

Yeah, not much point in my post, I know. If anything, it just shows it's possible for a "n00b" to learn and appreciate Linux in general and Gentoo in particular.

Portage and the configuration file update system does it for me!

With every other distribution I've used, you're stuck with a 6-12 monthly release cycle. You can (and should) use the distributions security update tools, but if, for example, you install Fedora Core 2, then no matter how often you run up2date, you're still running Fedora Core 2. The only way to get to0 Fedora Core 3, 4, 5 etc is to install it when it comes out.

In theory, you can upgrade a distribution from one release to the next, and it should be reasonably painless - but in real life....

With gentoo you install once, and then do the regular updates that you would with any other distribution. Except that when the next release comes out (Live CD in the gentoo world) you're already running it.!

1. why u shifed to gentoo.
Just playing around with distros and got stuck with gentoo, so it would be curiosity

2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.
Slackware, debian, userlinux, both old redhat and the newer Fedora, mandrake, crux, knoppix.

3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.
Well you fall in love with emerge when you use it. Other then that I would speed, control and USE-flags

4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.
For me none.
For others it depends on who's trying to use it, might be the lack of a grafical-installation and grafical administration-tools and so on.

nightblade wrote:

aqua26 wrote: I want to promote Gentoo in India.
Since many ppl over here use RH or fedora.

Then you only need one argument: no more RPM nightmares

Have you heard of yum and up2date or apt4rpm for that matter?

1. I shifted to Gentoo because I was bored and the pace of Fedora Core was WAY too slow for me.
2. I used RH9, FC1 and FC2
3. portage because it is the largest package repository I have ever come across. Using apt4rpm and yum I was always editing the repositories config so I could add more just to install basic things like the nvidia drivers or xmms with mp3 support. With gentoo I have never needed to use PORTDIR_OVERLAY and I've only had to compile two programs manually.
4. Sometimes stable packages break things. Example: the glibc update about 3-4 months ago which broke X unless you prelinked your entire system (I lost the forum topic about it but what I say is true).

/dev/random wrote: Have you heard of yum and up2date or apt4rpm for that matter?

I used RH for years, and up2date was one of the most popular in my bash_history.
But portage is far better. IMHO, of course

aqua26 wrote:Why Gentoo

Why not Gentoo?

1. why u shifed to gentoo.
Bored. Got tired of Windows' quirks and Redhats limitations.

2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.
Mostly delt with RH, a few others off and on...

3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.
I have to agree with the USE flags preference.

4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.
Certain tasks aren't as easy as I'd like them to be all of the time, but that's just me being lazy.

defkewl wrote:

nyowe wrote:portage is in my view one of the greatest strengths of Gentoo ...

Errr. Are you sure? Have you seen apt-get or yum yet? IMHO it's gotta to be better than portage.

Yum is definitely a good thing for RH/Fedora, as it deals with all of your dependencies for you, but it still deals with static RPM files (which become stale in some repositories). The real main reason I switched over to Gentoo from RH is that I hated the fact that, even though RPMs were available for PHP, none of the builds included imagemagick, which I wanted. Gentoo lets me specify the 'imagemagick' use flag and not worry about it every time I update.

Xenocrates wrote:Have you seen apt-get or yum yet? IMHO it's gotta to be better than portage.

Yum is definitely a good thing for RH/Fedora, as it deals with all of your dependencies for you, but it still deals with static RPM files (which become stale in some repositories). The real main reason I switched over to Gentoo from RH is that I hated the fact that, even though RPMs were available for PHP, none of the builds included imagemagick, which I wanted. Gentoo lets me specify the 'imagemagick' use flag and not worry about it every time I update.[/quote]

I can't agree more to this, coz that's the one of the biggest reason why gentoo is gr8.

aqua26 wrote: 4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.

:D

the only "bad" thing about gentoo is sometimes an ebuild will crash, and you have to forum search to find out whats going on and how to fix it, which is fine for me because I like how it creates a community(not exactly the greatest way to get people to come together but hey i like it)

1.) Read that it had the most mature AMD64 support.
2.) (Flipping through old CDs) Windows->Knoppix->Debian->Mandrake->Gentoo
3.) Control.
4.) Getting this damned ALSA to work god DAMN IT

But I think 4 is just me.

1. why u shifed to gentoo.

I was using Suse and wanted something else. I liked it, and still do, my g/f uses 9.2 and likes it a lot. I just found Suse, I dunno, 'clunky' and wanted to learn something about what was happening. Tried LFS, got it up and it was fine but I did want a bit of help so heard about Gentoo and portage and never looked back.

2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.

Most of them (literally I think!) before and during my gentoo use.

3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.

For me, as I like the command line and manually configuring files, is the ease of configurabilty (flags mainly) and speed. No other distro has been as quick. tried the 'fast' ones - Arch, Yoper, etc - and Gentoo is the quickest for me.

Portage is the best package management I have used. I installed FC3 last night (yes I was really bored, LOL) and I had no idea what was happening with the update - there was a kernel update available but wouldn;t let me use it for some reason and crashed the update prog because I hadn't marked them to be skipped, I am sure I could have worked it out, but it was soooooo slow and again, 'clunky'. Mind you, it looked nice. Apt, pac-man, etc, are all good but not as good as portage IMHO.

4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.

You do have to have an interest in maintaining your install. My g/f doesn't as an example, so she uses Suse. We both love the open source movement and Linux but prefer different ways of getting the same thing done.

You really do need a broadband connection. If I didn't I would probably, eventually, go to another distro and get their latest 'version', like FC and Suse do.

I just think it is the best distro around for me. I would always recommend trying others though. Gentoo is not for everyone. That is something some fanatics forget (about any distro - they like it and it is good for them, not necessarily good for someone else).

First of all...
Is it too much to ask of you to write using a proper language?
Remember that most of the users here are not English native speakers and using crappy language like you do, does not enhance readability. Besides, this is not a GSM phone with SMS text messaging, you don't pay per character!

1. Why did you switch to Gentoo?
I switched because I wanted a distro with more control and without all the hassle of rpm's etc.

2. Did you use any others distros before installing Gentoo?
Yes, Slackware, RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake

3. What are the advantages of Gentoo compared to other distros.
Portage.

4. What are the disadvantages of Gentoo other than a long installation process.
It is not a supported platform for many Enterprise applications.
It does not have a branch geared towards servers yet.

Erik

aqua wrote: 1. why u shifed to gentoo.
2. have u used any other distro before gentoo.
3. what r the advantages of gentoo over other distros.
4. what r the cons of gentoo besides long time to install it.

I started using Gentoo because of the ability to integrate custom patches with the main package management system used (Portage). I was also very surprised of the flexibility that USE flags gave, although I must admit that it has been a while that I took the time to tweak them again - I use an almost default setting on all my machines (due to ease of maintenance).

I started using Gentoo exclusively because it provided me with more flexibility on the overall system than any other distribution has ever given me. It is quite easy to use and has a very helpful community.

I've used a few distributions before, especially RedHat which was my distribution of choice for many, many years. But the lack of innovation drove me away from it. Not that I dislike the distribution in se, it's still a powerfull distribution, but not my taste anymore.

The advantages are its communities for sure (both user- as development).

The cons are its possibilities - there are so many things that can be improved/documented/drafted but little time to do