Slacker tries Gentoo

Ran accros this at OSnews..
It's a review of the Gentoo from a Slackware user..
Kinda the same experience I've had ;)
And I've been using Slackware longer then 'Steve Husted' has..

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12129

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I've been wanting to try Gentoo for some time, but always had to roll my eyes at the pages and pages of installation instructions. This time, however, I rolled up my sleeves and buckled down. Minutes later, I was on my way.

At this point, let me ward off the flames: I didn't like Gentoo. We'll get to why in a minute. But if you like Gentoo, then great! Another one joins the Linux Army, another domino down for the Redmond beast, another win for freedom to use your computer as you see fit. Stop reading now and go use your OS. Go on. Shoo!

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:err: Waiting for the first Gentoy fanboy(or girl) to comment..

HAHA, well i have to admit he deserves merit for the attempt, but i still have to correct or comment a few things.
Everyone knows me as a gentoo-freak, well I still am but i also don't deny other great distros. For.ex. At this moment
I'm typing on my laptop from work with , yes, slackware on it. Its good to me, for i need quick installs of packages and stuff at work.

Anyway I still believe Gentoo is a super-distro, BUT you have to like it. If you're not charmed in doing a cli-based install, you prolly never will love Gentoo. I for one love it very much, cause it forced me to use the cli, it forced me to troubleshoot, which expanded my linux knowledge, and there's no better distro which gives this knowledge boost in just , let's say 2 weeks time.
Also it is still swift and fast for me, besides the compiles ;). I also had numerous discussions about gentoo and i decided not to force people in gentoo. If you don't have love on first sight with it, you prolly never will like it.

Also the remarks about the gentoo-site i find very wrong. I find the Gentoo-site(wiki) the best there is. EVERY problem you have with Gentoo is already solved via the Gentoo forums. EVERY problem i had, i found resolved there. Also the Gentoo documentation project is very advanced there. I never found a distro with a better documentation. Not Slack, not debian, not FreeBSD, not fedora , ....

Anyway i rest my case with saying, its worth a shot trying, just to see if you have the chemistry :p

Cheers,

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I for one love it very much, cause it forced me to use the cli, it forced me to troubleshoot,

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Ah the genius of the open source community... tricking users into using new, superfluous versions of software they already know under the guise of expanding their knowledge. ;)

cheers,

catch

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Originally posted here by catch
Ah the genius of the open source community... tricking users into using new, superfluous versions of software they already know under the guise of expanding their knowledge. ;)

cheers,

catch

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Yea no ****. " Gentoo is hard to learn but you learn a lot" .... Yea, I learned that I already have Free BSD and Linux and therefore don't need that stack of poo.

I agree 100% with Shrekkie. Gentoo is nice because it's not yet LFS but not quite Fedora [well, not at all really]. Yeah it takes a long time to install and a lot of people will think there's no need for that -fomg-optimize type of thing...

It was a good learning experience for me too in terms of getting a better hang of Linux. As for the install, it can't be that hard... if I managed to do a stage 1 the first time around.

But people need to learn to read ;)

I'm sticking to Gentoo as my main box [well, laptop] because it worked great so far. To each their own.

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Yea no ****. " Gentoo is hard to learn but you learn a lot" .... Yea, I learned that I already have Free BSD and Linux and therefore don't need that stack of poo

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And people still weren't able to teach you not to act like a child. If you answer then do it constructive. We all know you're suse-minded, but if you can't answer in a gentoo-thread in a normal way or on-topic and just answer to try and pick, then stfu, cause it doesn't bother me anymore. Just grow up man ! Nobody likes your 1337 OS-behavior anymore ....

What you didn't attack Catch? He bashed it more than I did. I'm childish, and I just got into an accident.... Actually it was like 5 hours ago BUT I JUST GOT HOME waiting for cops, two truck to drag my truck away and the rent a car people to bring me A ****ING SUBURBAN which needs 170 dollars in gas to get it going.

Yea I've had a wonderfull day, really makes me think about things, like why I bothered putting my opinion on this thread like Catch did. Doesn't matter what I say about Gentoo, you'll twist it into hatred. I just checked and you have yet to reply to a PM I sent long ago about giving Gentoo another chance to like it. Why no reply? Worried you won't be able to flame at me when I post if there isn't a reason to do so?

I've just spent 4 (complete) days trying to install gentoo. I've been using Slack for about a year now and finally decided I should take the plunge into gentoo. Got a little free time and downloaded the minimal install disk, got rid of the Slackware partition and started through the long and laborious process of the handbook. After 3 separate attempts (with stage1, stage2 and stage3 respectively) I've given up today.

To cut a long story short, I finally realised that there must be something wrong with my hardware that kept giving me 'segmentation fault' and 'No error bug, must be a hardware or OS error' errors all through the installation. I mean, whenever I tried to 'emerge' something, if it was a huge installation like X or maybe gtk, it would compile for an hour or so and then give me the error. I've finally given up today, and am going to dig out my slack 10.2 disks from inside and have a happy installation :D.

But some good did come out of trying to install gentoo. I've got a pretty good idea about what options to select (and what not to select) while compiling the kernel ;).

But other than that, I learnt never to mess with gentoo again.

/edit: Forgot to mention ... if I do have hardware issues, for some reason slackware and windows XP are not that sensitive to it as gentoo. They work perfectly fine.

Nobody said Gentoo was for the faint of heart. I wasn't even that good with Linux when I installed it but I did get it right the first time in a stage 1 install. On a laptop, mind you.

Natural selection at its best.

Uhhh no.... Natural selection is aure as hell not at it's best. There is a distro that supposedly only 8 people have ever been able to install. Can't remember what it was.... and as for this "hard" install for Gentoo, ROCK Linux has been doing that for how long? Then again what do I know, I'm a child ;)

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Natural selection at its best.

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I couldn't agree more.
That time spent on esoteric installation processes was time you didn't spend mating.

cheers,

catch

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Originally posted here by catch
I couldn't agree more.
That time spent on esoteric installation processes was time you didn't spend mating.

cheers,

catch

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Carefull catch, you'll end up being called Childish because you and me see no reason for installs to take 3 days and then another 5 catching up with the security holes.

"Not now I'm compiling KDE!"

Meh... I use Windows with pre-defined configuration templates...

If I haven't been called childish yet, it's never gonna happen.

cheers,

catch

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you'll end up being called Childish because you and me see no reason for installs to take 3 days and then another 5 catching up with the security holes.

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That's why I never "upgraded" to XP. I figure if God wanted me to use XP
he would have given me a new pc with it already installed. What's wrong
with 98 anyway? Right now I'm on a box that I got for free for doing some
repairs on a co-worker's computer. It (this box) had no hard drive, but I
found a used one laying in the corner. I popped the drive in and booted SLAX.

It took about ten minutes to fdisk, format and install the OS to disk.
EVERYTHING WORKS!, The DVD player, the cd burner,
I can play Freecell! I am on line. What else could you ask for?

It appears that a bunch of people are considering a career change into proctology given the depth of analysis [sic] that got involved at times in this thread.

Moving on, then...

I'm bringing up a slightly old topic (I've been away for a while, blame me for using the search function) because I'm an old-time slacker that has given gentoo quite a few shots as well.

Just my insight that I'd like to offer future gentoo users that end up finding this result from a search:

You are not learning how Linux works so much as you are learning how Gentoo works.

There are Linux principles that create the foundation of each and every Linux distribution and of course each distro will have their own tweaks and quirks. But never have I seen a distro go so far out of it's way as to be an obscure (yet fun for some) form of Linux education. CFLAGs and similar are strictly Gentoo-philosophy based where as depedency checking based upon file versions (apt-get, swaret) can spread across multiple linux distributions. I enjoyed gentoo, but I didn't learn Linux from the Stage 1 to Desktop process... I learned Gentoo.

The reason you don't learn Linux by using Gentoo is quite simple. Emerge is only in Gentoo. The install.... Well unless you only use ROCK Linux, you're not going to learn it just from using it. The reason is Linux is very varied. No two distros are exactly alike.

When one learns RedHat, one learns pay a high price.

When one learns Mandrake one learns everything isn't working

When one learns SUSE one learns how useability doesn't have to be taken away for security

when one learns Debin one learns that it's possible to have out dated software on a new machine

When one learns Slackware, one learns how to make Linux useable for all distros...

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8930318322.html