[wellylug] Distro Changing...

[Vincent Cox]

Jethro Carr wrote:

>On Tue, 2003-12-23 at 18:19, Vincent Cox wrote:
>  
>
>>On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 07:34:39 +1300, Jethro Carr 
>><dodocaptain at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>hi,
>>>
>>>Redhat linux has had too many bugs for me, and the new fedora, has far
>>>too many. I want to change distro, to something stable and fast.
>>>
>>>I was thinking Gentoo, as it allows you to compile the software for your
>>>pc, which should make everything run fast, like a LFS system.
>>>
>>>Has anyone tried/got the latest gentoo?
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Hi
>>
>>  I have just got Gentoo 1.4 installed on a 500 Mhz AMD system.
>>
>>First impressions so far is all good.
>>
>>I built this install from the very beginning, you can get precompiled 
>>stages 1 - 3, it depends how much customisation you want to do.
>>    
>>
>
>Does it boot faster than with a distro like redhat?
>  
>

That depends on the services you have enabled, it seems about about as 
fast as Slackware which I would consider
to be faster then redhat.

>
>  
>
>>emerge is brilliant, so easy to add packages, dependancies all sorted out 
>>for you.
>>    
>>
>
>Can you use emerge to give you a list of files, that you can download
>later? (eg: I don't like downloading lots of files on a 56k line without
>a manager....)
>  
>

yes, you can do "emerge -p gnome"  for instance and that will give you a 
list of programmes it will download.
I am still learning about the emerge packaging system but I have read 
that you can set it up so it does all the downloading first then do
the compiling so you dont have to stay online.


You can also decide to go with the stable programmes or go with the 
bleeding edge stuff as well, e.g kernel 2.6.

Speed wise programmes seem to run/start faster though I can't back that 
statement up with any scientific facts only what I have noticed, like
glxgears run at 80fps where as before on any other distro it would have 
been about 60fps.  Open office starts up ok (that took over 24 hours to 
build).

>>Documantation at the Gentoo website easy to follow.
>>
>>If you have been around Linux for a while you should have no problems 
>>getting it going, it isn't for newbies though.
>>    
>>
>After LFS, It's going to be pleasant to install... ;)
>
>
>thanks,
>
>
>  
>
hope this helps

vince