Glen Stewart wrote: "I know we have a GenToo user in the group - can you
tell us about your install and maintenance experiences with that distro?
How hard was it to initially configure, and what has it been like to
maintain over time?"

Not sure who Glen was thinking of, but I asked my son (also a Christian) if
he would mind answering to this group (since I haven't had much opportunity
to install / maintain Linux in recent times).  I am forwarding his answer.

Rich
--
Rich Thirsk / Calgary, AB

-----Original Message-----
From: Jared Thirsk
Sent: January 25, 2004 00:08
To: Rich Man
Subject: Re: FW: [C_LUG] Mandrake 10.0b1 is out


My Gentoo Experiences:

Installation is done at a low level, by the command line, but the
instructions are excellent, (and apparently improved since I last
used them,) and I remember the ancillary utilities (for setting up
network, and cfdisk) have simple and convenient text-based GUIs.

I have heard a couple people say installing Gentoo was easier than
installing Mandrake 9.x or 10.x, one guy apparently had some device
autodetection problem or something that broke the install chain.  The
install is definitely pretty easy for people who are comfortable with
a command line and are competent enough to use cfdisk to partition
their drive.

As for maintenance, this is what truly makes Gentoo a breeze to use.
The portage system is excellent, requiring 'emerge <packagename>' to
install a new package (I install random apps and every remotely
popular app or library is in the Gentoo's portage system).  Keeping a
system up to date is very easy -- just do 'emerge sync' to update the
portage tree (list of packages), and then 'emerge -u world' to
automatically update all libraries and applications on the system.

I used to go insane trying to track down rpm dependencies under
Mandrake, and before that, Red Hat, but no more.  (I don't know how
well MandrakeUpdate works these days.  Hopefully it is better.)
Gentoo is known for being a more hands-on or guru system, but out of
all the OS's I have used as my primary system (DOS Win95 Win98 Win2K
RedHat 7.x, Mandrake 8 ) I it has by far been the easiest to keep up
to date and to add new apps.  (And because it is so easy to keep up
to date, I am more likely to do so, which makes me less vulnerable to
security issues.  That reminds me... I have been quite impressed with
gentoo's security vulnerability announcement list.)

Sometimes packages have updated config files, and Portage
understandably can't just overwrite your config files with new ones,
so you are required to merge them manually.  This is pretty easy to
do for me, with the merge utility gentoo has, but someone who wasn't
linux-savvy and didn't know what all of files in /etc/* mean might
have trouble with merging them.  This is probably the hardest part of
maintenance.

One more thing that just makes sense to me is that there is no real
version of Gentoo distro.  The installer has versions, that pretty
much don't change, but once you install gentoo, you can just keep
running 'emerge -u world' to forever be up to date with whatever the
latest stable (or experimental if you choose) packages.

Gentoo is known for being a distribution that allows you to compile
from source, and this is what I do, since I don't mind unused CPU
cycles being used to compile stuff to have them tailored to my
architecture (for near-negligible gains in my case :) ).  However,
there are now also binary packages available for the impatient (I
don't know how comprehensive the availability of these are.)

Portage also has a slot system, making it smart enough to allow
different versions of the same software to be installed
simultaneously.  I've got KDE 3.1.5 as well as 3.2.0 release
candidate (3.1.95) installed, as well as 3.0.5.  Portage and emerge
aren't perfect, and once in a while (maybe every 6 months) there is
some freak glitch in some compilation for some package, but the
gentoo user list is highly active and friendly and the answer to my
problem has always been posted before I needed to ask.  (Latest
glitch: for some reason related to complications with automake tools,
I needed to reinstall gcc 3.2.3 to upgrade from KDE 3.1.4 to 3.1.5.)

Jared



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