[ale] Distro question...

[Jeff Hubbs]

Mike, you're not too far off the mark and I'm not surprised that you had
that reaction.  I had the same reaction over my first few installs. 
However, after having done a mess of Gentoo installs over the past
couple years - and I keep improving at it (just this week, I was able to
recover a machine that I had just done a Stage 1 install on - its boot
drive failed at reboot and I was able to salvage the situation quite
easily) - I've definitely found a lot to like.

I think that the real strength of Gentoo starts to show if you are
setting up a "Gentoo shop" in your home, office, lab, etc.  For
instance, let's say you're going to set up a bunch of computers for a
lab.  You take a Gentoo installation (of whatever type) and you sort of
meld it into what will be your "workstation build" and you distribute
that to your lab machines.  

Don't get me wrong, it's not for everyone or any setting, and personally
I'm very disappointed with the desktop config docs that don't go far
enough toward getting you to a Mandrake/SuSE/RH/Fedora kind of desktop
experience (i.e., all your stuff Just Works and your USB/CDs/etc
automount, but there is a lot of work being done in a great many areas
in the Gentoo project all the time.  

Gentoo effectively has no installer.  You boot to a live CD, set up your
partitions, mount them up, copy stuff to them, chroot to the top of that
tree, make the partitions into that of a working Linux machine using the
Portage system, and reboot.  Yes, there is room to automate much of
this.  Someone somewhere may be working on that, I'm not sure (I don't
prowl the forums).  

A lot of my enthusiasm for Gentoo comes from having gotten it going on
my AMD64 laptop, even with massive complications like buggy ACPI
hardware, thanks in large part to the support community.  There are some
rough edges, yes, but for the most part I'm very happy with the laptop
overall (and right now it's powering my consulting gig!!).

Jeff

On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 22:32, Mike Panetta wrote:
> I just got done messing with it, and I was not too impressed.  I did
> a stage one, compile it yourself install, but the time was not what 
> bothered me, as it was a spare computer and I could just leave it 
> be and come back to it whenever.  What I disliked was having to
> configure everything by hand.  I already know how to do this, I
> learnbed it along time ago in my slackware days, I do not care
> to do it anymore unless its absolutly necessary.   I have done it
> plenty of times as an admin, I would love to get away from such
> mundane things on a PC that I am using for enjoyment, not 
> to configure.  Maybe I missed something, maybe I did not read
> enough of the FAQ, but it seems that the only option with gentoo is
> to configure it by hand.  Please tell me if Iam wrong...  I may try it again.
> 
> Mike
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>
> Sent: Nov 11, 2004 10:22 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
> Subject: Re: [ale] Distro question...
> 
> Not harsh, but perhaps obsolete.  Perhaps your opinion hasn't been
> informed by Gentoo's Stage 3 and Gentoo Reference Platform install
> methods for those of you you who can't wait for every stitch of code to
> compile.  
> 
> Jeff
> 
> On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 21:11, James Sumners wrote:
> > Most people don't like wasting their time though.
> > 
> > That statement isn't meant to be harsh; it is just the facts in my opinion.
> > Gentoo is a waste of time for a mail server.
> > 
> > On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 20:28:33 -0500
> > Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > Has no one brought up Gentoo?  I'm starting to get fairly comfortable
> > > with it and I'd have no heartburn over using it for servers.
> 
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