[clue-tech] Taking the Gentoo Plunge?

[Adam Bultman]

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katanacb at comcast.net wrote:
> Ok,
>
> I'm thinking about taking the Gentoo plunge, and I've read *lots*
> of information about how difficult it is to setup (or not), how
> time consuming it is to setup and administer (or not), how patches
> bork the entire system (or not).  I'm not afraid to setup Gentoo on
> my system(s), I've used linux for years and years, but I wanted to
> get some sort of idea from local guys who actually RUN the
> distribution what their experience has been like.
>
> If I do this I'm going to do it on 2 laptops, and 1 desktop (which
> doubles as a fileserver for things like MP3s, etc).  I prefer KDE
> to gnome but I can be converted.  I've most recently run Ubuntu,
> SuSE before that but I've used pretty much every distro out there
> over the years.
>
> So, for those of you out there who run Gentoo, what's your
> experience been like?  Are the rumours true?  I've downloaded the
> recent 2007.0 release and I can tell you that the live DVD seems to
> perform better than hosted systems on my machine (I know it's
> strange, but it's true) and I did do a gentoo install 3-4 years
> ago, but just got frustrated after borking my install a few times.

I haven't run gentoo as a desktop or server in a few years, but my
reason for quitting gentoo was stability.   Towards the end of my time
with gentoo, stability took a massive plunge and I was having to
reboot quite frequently.

I would imagine it's gotten better since then, since a lot of people
are working on it and running it. My most recent run with Gentoo
failed because even Gentoo doesn't support the video card in my SPARC
workstation (Solaris drivers only, bummer.)

The only time it takes to manage a gentoo system is with waiting for
it to compile things you want, and running etc-update. etc-update is a
real show stopper for me since it requires you to manually answer
questions.  Do you want to replace your current with the replacement?
Do you want to diff? Do you want to toss the changes? And so forth.
Answering 'yes' is easy, but you'll find that critical config files
like fstab are overwritten with defaults. Not fun.

If you're going to run it as a workstation, have at it.  If you're
looking to run a server, I'd steer clear.  If you're looking to have a
speed demon machine, buying a newer CPU would be easier.

Adam
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