> Comparing windows to Gentoo is not fair at all to Linux. Why? They're both OSes serving the same function. Would you prefer I choose Debian as a comparison?
This might be flamebait (It's half meant that way), but Red Hat compares nicely to 9x. Gentoo compares nicely to Advanced Server. If you want Gentoo's level of use, buy Red Hat's advanced server version. >Gentoo compiles > itself as it installs. You can't say that Linux reboots once during > install either. This depends on the distro. If your installing Gentoo > from stage 1 then it will probably require a few reboots. Even if I install Gentoo from Tom's Root Boot, and do a stage 1 install there is only 1 reboot. Once the machine is completely built. A possible exception to this is with hardware RAID, but that will be the case (I suspect) with any chrooted install. Grub can't configure the MBR. When the system starts up after the install is complete (starting from a boot floppy), you need to finish with grub. If you were cockier than me, you don't really need to reboot it again at that point, but I like to KNOW it'll work for me, so I do... If you were REALLY cocky (and didn't have HW raid), you wouldn't need to reboot at all, ever. Though I'd call a person doing that an idiot. >Installing > Redhat? The only reboot it does is when it's done, so it requires 0 > reboots during installation. You will also find that if you build Linux > servers a lot, it is helpful to have config templates. Make a samba > config file with generic settings in it, make one for LPRng, CUPS, Apache, > and whatever other services you use. Then when you build a server, you > can just do a find/replace on entries that change depending on the server > and tweak the rest of the files the way they need to be for that > particular server. That way you aren't recreating all those files from > scratch every time you build a new box. I reuse conf files regularly. Truth be told, I don't think I could remember all the configure switches to get Samba running as a PDC without them... Kev.
