Libranet 3.0 out

[Franco Saliola]

> On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 02:05:56AM -0400, Franco Saliola wrote:
> > Ubuntu and Gentoo are on the short list. Both are attractive.

On 4/21/05, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Out of curiousity: Since you are considering Gentoo, I would love to
> know why you are considering it.  I personally don't understand the
> point of its existance so I figure I must be missing something (or am
> just not at all the intended target), so perhaps someone who is
> considering it can explain what makes it attractive to them.

I don't have any experience with Gentoo, I know very little about it,
but I like trying new distros. I've successfully installed and run the
following: RedHat; Mandrake; Slackware; LFS; Fedora; RedHat Enterprise
Linux; Debian; Knoppix (harddrive install); to name a few. So it's
time to try something new.

Mainly, there are two theoretical features I like about Gentoo.

1. I usually install some distribution (recently Debian/Debian-based)
and end up compiling a bunch of programs from source for various
reasons (I want certain features enabled; I want the newest versions;
for example). I don't mind doing this, but it seems that Gentoo's
packaging system would help with specific compilation arguments for
packages (I haven't really looked into it in great detail). But, of
course, this will only work for the Gentoo supported packages.

2. I like the idea that 'emerge' -- the package manager -- will always
keep the system updated to the most recent distro. In theory, this
means that you would not have to re-install from scratch again. Of
course, I am quite sceptical of this (I imagine new technology will
force gentoo to branch), but it is a nice thing to imagine it might
work. It would definitely be handy if such a thing were true. Anyone 
have any experience with this? It'd be nice to hear experiences.

Some cons. I have installed Linux From Scratch, and that was fun. I
definitely learned a lot, and I recommend it at least once to
everyone. Gentoo seems like an automated version of LFS, so I doubt
one'll learn as much. The time spent compiling isn't worth the trade
off in optimization. One can opt for the binary version of the install
that bypasses all this compilation stuff (that seems to defeat part of
the point of Gentoo).

That being said, Ubuntu is the most likely candidate. I know my way
around the Debian system, apt-get works very well, I'm curious to see
what all the craze is about, and it's got a great name!

I also have a licence for RedHat Enterprise Linux (5 in fact, through
my university), but I'm not considering it all for my home system.

Franco

--
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml