[plug] GenToo anyone ...

[Bill Kenworthy]

At the plug meeting last night, I was looking to see if anyone was
seriously using gentoo - but came up blank.  However there seems to be a
fair bit of interest in this distro - I was asked to post my impressions
of it:

Gentoo is basicly a distibution that is set up to download software as
tar.bz2 files, and control the compile and install to the "gentoo"
specification.  The initial design for the this system was "pinched"
from BSD (ports) and is called portage.  Its rather debianish, but
compiles everything during install, not download 386 binaries.  You
download a 17Mbyte cd image and boot from that to start the install. 
Everything else comes down the network as tar.bz2 files! (unless you
start with one of the staged images with the most common bz2 files
already present.  There is also a ready built binary install, but thats
cheating! (and defeats the prime purpose of this distro - to chew up the
users spare time!)

My hope is that two years down the track, I will have an up-to-date,
streamlined system that still works harmoniously.  With Mandrakes
increasing complexity, a windows like clean,reinstall and reconfigure
for me is getting more demanding each upgrade.

Pro's
1) software is compiled and therefore optimised for your system under
your control.
2) It has a quite obvious speed increase over Mandrake on the same
hardware due to (1)
3) Flexible
4) well documented install
5) simplified install and maintenance (upgrade from gnome1.4 to gnome2
was three commands, left overnight to download and logged into gnome 2
the next morning!)  Copied the downloaded files to the second machine
and compiled that the next night!

Con's
1) Takes forever to install from the basic cd if you use a modem(2
weeks! - I like to have a variety of kitchen sinks installed in case I
ever need them!): yes there are ways around this, but if you use them
you will understand they dont fully alleviate the problem (no kitchen
sinks!)
2) No help from sophisticated gui applications for configuration - you
really notice the lack when building a complex combination such as a
working desktop/home server.
3) Requires a good to excellent knowledge of linux
4) many rough edges including broken builds etc.  Currently OpenOffice,
VMware(win2kpro) and vnc require some hours and external help (mail
lists) to sort out.
5) Definitely leading edge with little tollerance for legacy hardware
compatibility (leading edge is one of the tennets!)
5) requires a network (internet access) to do the install.  There are
now workarounds (cd's, images etc but a net connection will still ease
things.  Modems are not supported (unless you attach it to another
machine!)

I started out doing a test install and config on an old machine and when
I accidentally wiped the boot partition on my main machine, I was ready
to go.  Only problems on install were getting grub to work on the
kt7a-raid board (had to really read docs and google for this one),
software raid and mail (jut too complex!, but thats not really gentoo's
fault).  I already had a working system for the modem, most of the
tar.bz2's etc which sped up and simplified things.  I decided to use the
unstable install (gcc3 and gnome2) which is probably part of my
vnc/vmware/oo woes.

My impressions:
Only experts need apply
Suited for simple servers and specialist configurations
Not suitable for the lesser skilled, or productive desktops (yet!) -
this is where you see what the gnomes at RedHat, Mandrake etc really do
with their time ...

However if you have some *basic* linux knowledge and want to learn the
real "under the hood" stuff, and your livelyhood doesnt depend on it, I
cant think of a better distro!

BillK