[CLUE-Tech] distro question

[Collins Richey]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 13:44:00 -0600
"Dale K. Hawkins" <dhawkins at cdrgts.com> wrote:

> OK.  I have played with many different distros over the years and have
> recently been contemplating giving gentoo a whirl.  I am not an idiot
> and I do so love to tinker.  It seems there is some experience on the
> list with gentoo.  So, I just wanted to ask people's opinions about
> gentoo.
> 
> I have been using debian quite happily for several years now.  The
> gentoo is a curiousity thing based on the fact that
> 
> A) I recently had to upgrade some non-debian software and was hoping
> gentoo might have a better way to handle this situation, and
> 
> B) I saw the gentoo references today and thought what the hell, have I
> really suffered enough lately?
> 

Welcome to the light side <g>

Gentoo is a lot of fun, if you have patience to get through the initial
install (and upgrades of things like kde and gnome). The primary
prerequisistes are:

1> Ability to read and follow instructions - I presume you qualify.
2> Patience during the initial install - approximately 25 hours to get a
basic desktop system going (less if you use pre-compiled modules) on a
modern system (2+G, 512M). 
3> Preferrably high-speed internet connection, or tolerance for
downloading packages overnight using a modem.
4> All you need is an empty 5G+ partition or more and a driving system
which you certainly have with Debian.
5> If you're a Debian bigot, you may experience withdrawal symptons
when you find out that gentoo like most of the world calls it linux
instead of GNU/Linux <g>.
6> Gentoo has almost as many available packages as Debian.

I'm a gentoo fan from way back, so I'm definitely prejudiced.

If I can help you in any way, let me know.

-- 
 /\/\
( CR ) Collins Richey
 \/\/