[CLUE-Tech] Escape from RH 8.0

[Collins]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 03:06 pm, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Mar 2003 10:57:51 -0700

[ snips ]

>
> Being only passingly aware of Gentoo, I can't completely speak to that,
> but IIRC, it relies heavily on having bandwidth.

Only too true.  I'm sure I wouldn't be quite as content if I weren't on cable.  
After you complete the initial install, the bandwidth rquirement is not 
significant until you come up against another KDE or XFree upgrade.  It is 
possible, however, to do the source code downloads in batches and then do the 
installs later.

>
> > Unless there is a major incompatible change in the glibc/gcc/kernel
> > environment, you never need to reinstall to be at current level.  The
> > concept of needing to install a different RH release to get KDE 3.1
> > (etc.) is foreign to gentoo.
>
> Actually, the same can be said for any RPM-based distro. I could, if I
> wanted to (and have, in the past), just continue to apply updates as I
> feel like it. I've done glibc and the kernel this way, as well as several
> interations of Gnome.

Quite true.


[ more snips ]

> RPM hell seems to be less an issue now than before.

At least a part of RPM-hell for me was finding all the packages I wanted.  RH 
does a good job of supplying security and basic system packages, but as a 
commercial endeavor, they aren't really a source for all the miscellaneous 
packages. that people like to tinker with.

>
> But do think this might be my last RH upgrade, unless they come out with a
> setup mechanism that lets me choose whether I want the dumbed-down (hey,
> it's almost like Windoze!) or the "I know what I'm doing" configuration.
>
> I will say I much prefer KDE as it comes on the Knoppix distro, to RH's
> bluecurved rendition.
>
> The biggest barrier to switching to something like Debian or SuSe though,
> is simple familiarity, and the fact that I have a running system built
> around the decisions I made when I intially built it (using Gentus --- a
> tweaked RH). I don't look forward to spending the time to make the switch.
> My expectation is that trying to install another distro over the top of RH
> will leave me with a mess of stuff in differing locations, which I will
> never get cleaned up. I think I'd be better of waiting until I can build a
> new machine.
>

Agreed on all of this.  Unless you've got spare partitions to build a new 
system on the side, it's probably better not to mess up your running system.  
With gentoo or LFS (and I'm sure a few others), however, you can build a 
system in a spare partition in chroot mode without much interferance for your 
running system, as long as you have the cpu power and the bandwidth for 
downloads.

Good l;uck.
-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
Athlon-XP gentoo 1.4_rc2 kde 3.1