[CLUE-Tech] distro question

[Adam Bultman]

That's right, I'm top posting.  My comment is an general one, not 
necessarily picking and choosing from the below lines.

I use gentoo.  I've been running gentoo for a while.  I have it on this 
laptop, on my normal workstation, on my file server, on my Sun 
enterprise 2, on my (now dead) alpha, I've installed it on anything I 
can get it to go on. When I get my power supply for my SGI O2, I'll 
stick gentoo on that.

I like gentoo for a few different reasons:
1.  It is source based, but requires very little intervention from me.
2.  Dependencies are solved automagically.
3. I don't have to surf the net to get new packages.
4. It doesn't have problems like RPM and APT have (and yes, I know how 
to use both).
5.  HArd to install programs (gnucash, mplayer, xine) work fine and 
install easy.

I'm a lazy person. To get what I want in fedora, Red Hat, slackware, 
debian, I have to go through this huge process at install.  It takes me 
several hours of annoying tweaking and installing to get those systems 
running, only to find I forgot some stuff and have to get it.  With 
gentoo, I get things started (I can do it by heart on alpha, sparc, and 
x86) and I just queue things up.  I start it before I go to bed, wake 
up, see things running, do what  I need to do, and by the end of the 
day, it's done, I have X running, and all of my apps. Yes, there is 
waiting involved.  But c'mon.  I'd rather spend 12 hours waiting for a 
slew of programs to install than search for 3 hours trying to find all 
dependencies for fedora, then finding a working mirror, etc. 

Some people say that Gentoo is for Mandrake newbies that have moved on, 
thinking they are leet (also, that gentoo is the 'rice rocket' version 
of the computer geek).  Eh. Whatever. I'm just lazy. 

I've run a lot of distros (slack red hat 6 6.2 7.2 7.4 8) suse debian 
turbolinux beehive fedora) , and I think I've settled on gentoo. Give it 
a whirl; I think you find you'll like it.  I did.

Collins Richey wrote:

>On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:16:29 -0600
>Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Dale K. Hawkins 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 got annoyed with it, quickly.  Knowing that a security-related
>>emerge is available always made me want to just emerge everything at
>>that point, and even on an Athlon 2500 that always took forever, it
>>seemed... the constant siren call (on my play machine) of "hey there's
>>new stuff available" every time the last compile finished... became
>>utterly distracting for me.
>>
>>Granted Debian unstable can be similarly crazy this way, but Debian 
>>testing is a little bit slower.  Of course you're not guaranteed 
>>security patches with Debian testing, so... Catch 22.
>>
>>    
>>
>
><start of ramble>
>
>You make your bed, and then you lie in it. Gentoo just happens to be on
>the leading (not usually bleeding) edge of changes. The gentoo
>developers just love to tinker, and if a new dot release of their pet
>software doesn't break their test machines, they release it for testing
>("you have been warned since it's in testing status."). After a few
>weeks, if nothing goes bang, they release it to stable. Just as with any
>other distro, what seems to be stable may have some unforeseen
>deficiencies even after it has been marked stable (let me know when
>bug-free software has been invented <g>).
>
>For years I remained on the stable brach of Gentoo and let new available
>packages age for a couple of weeks before doing anything. I would
>even clone my system to another partition to provide backup before
>applying updates.
>
>Then, about 6 months ago I got a newer computer, so I decided to go all
>out with the testing branch. I had already verified that 2.5/2/6 kernels
>were stable for my desktop environment, so I installed my new system
>with ~x86 (testing) set, enabled nptl, converted my /dev usage to udev,
>and began to remain within a few days of current at all times. Only one
>bleep in 6 months, and that appears to be a problem with nptl (more
>below). udev/hotplug took a little bit of tinkering, but it is also
>quite stable now.
>
>I liked the setup so well, that I installed my laptop in the same
>fashion, and it too has been rock solid stable. Except as noted below
>and except for different cpu's, video cards, ethernet cards, and sound
>cards, my two machines stay basically at the same maintenance level
>(quite current).
>
>The only problem I've encountered is with mplayer and mplayerplug-in
>which appear to have a problem with nptl enabled systems. There have
>been at least a dozen dot releases recently, and none of them work
>reliably on my desktop system. The laptop had lagged a little behind in
>maintenance when I discovered the problem, and mplayer works just fine
>there. But even if I downgrade the desktop to the same levels as the
>laptop, I can't get it to work. What happens is this: if I play a movie
>trailer, the trailer (video and audio) plays successfully to the end;
>then firefox craps out or hangs. Others have the same problem with
>mozilla. People on the linux-users list claim that a recent mplayer dot
>release fixes that very problem, but it doen't work for me. So I'm
>playing a waiting game, monitoring the bugzilla entry. According to
>bugzilla the problem disappears on non-nptl systems.
>
>OK, back on track. When fixes appear, you are not bound to apply them
>immediately, except for security related stuff. In any case, I am never
>bothered by the compiles. I just let them chug away while I'm doing
>email or browsing linux news. On 2.6 compiles never interfere with
>interactive work, so I never notice them. When kde or gnome releases
>come along, I just start them at supper time and they are done by the
>next morning.
>
>Some gentoo users with multiple machines go to great lengths to get the
>compiles done ASAP. There is a function called distcc which allows you
>to farm out the compiles in parallel on multiple machines. In this
>fashion, you can complete a kde emerge in a couple of hours. Too complex
>for me. I just let the compiles plug along.
>
></End of ramble>
>
>  
>