On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 01:24:48PM -0800, Jason Smith wrote: > I love debian because all the packages install so > nicely, > but it doesn't install Xwindows very well.
I installed Woody ~10 days ago. I wanted to replace exim with sendmail, because I'm more familiar with sendmail. I was already, uh, unimpressed[1], with the install, but this was the straw that broke the camel's back. To call the Woody sendmail package broken and insecure would be euphemistic. It didn't even install completely and debconf never said a peep, and the default config file has about every security check turned off. OTOH, I've been quite impressed with Gentoo. The install is from a "live CD" (there's also a "live CD" with Unreal Tournament 3) and you basically just login as root and start typing commands. That may sound like a recipe for disaster at first, but the install process is well documented, you just follow the steps as documented. IMHO, the main benefit of this method is that the person installing is learning how to manage the system from the get-go. Make a partition, format it, etc ... all from the command line. No graphical installer to, well, get in the way. Although gentoo is something of a source distribution, you don't have to really build from scratch. You can download the "stage3" tarball and basically install a capable system from a single tarball. After I finished the install, I played around with emerge, read some of the documentation and found a how-to for updating to the current version 1.4_rc1 from 1.x, which was still on my laptop. I originally had planned to dual boot Debian on both my dev machine and my laptop. However, the sendmail fiasco on the dev machine made me a little, uh, wary. I planned to actually run Woody, the "stable" release. I was liking the small but nice features added to the ebuild system (a global "buildpkg" option was what I really missed before) and being able to find the documentation I wanted with relative ease on gentoo though. So I read the update howto and though, "Yeah right, build and bootstrap new compilers and libraries from a few commands, this should be good for a laugh." Well, it didn't go without a hitch. Twice I ran out of space while building the java suite. But, of course, this is my, the administrator's, fault. So I "emerge unmerg"d qt, gimp, cups ... the larger, nonessential packages and just retyped the last command. By the end, the pII 266 had been compiling for ~18 hours, and finished without error. I consider that impressive. I will say though, if you don't wish to read documentation and learn how to administer and maintain your system (which is explained in the documentation), then gentoo is not for you. If you are using Linux to learn about it, then I'd say it's worth the time to try it out. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [1] Yes, the default config of X on Woody puts the 100 dpi fonts in front of the 75 dpi fonts. That annoys me. _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
