> couple of questions. Since I've only been using Linux for the past 2
> months, am I adequately prepared to install it? I printed out as much
Mentally or with software and documentation? :) It sounds like you have
all the docs you can get, and from your email it sounds like you have
the courage. Now Gentoo isn't for the completely feint of heart, but if
you're willing to learn about your system and maybe dive into the guts a
bit, that's all you need. If you don't know something, you'll learn it
soon :)
Standard disclaimer: Back up everything that's important just in case
you accidently reformat the wrong disk or something during the install
:)
> installation is frightening. Also, provided I do manage to get it working,
The install isn't that bad relatively speaking. Once you are actually
doing it you'll find that the reams of text don't translate into that
much actual work. A lot of it is several paragraphs to explain
something, or give examples of how things should look. That said, it's
not the "click, click, click, wait, click, installed!" that comes with
say Redhat or mandrake :)
> are there any ways to get updates and patches like Red Hat's up2date? How
Absolutely, you run (as root):
# emerge sync - downloads updated package list
# emerge -up world - displays packages to be updated)
# emerge -u world - actaully does the downloading, compiling, and
installation.
Because when you install from scratch you run this (though you do system
instead of world) your install will automatically be completely up to
date, with no need to immediately go and download updates :)
> does Gentoo compare to other distros? Are there any special advantages in
> it being source-based as opposed to being RPM-based? Finally, what is
> portage like? It sounds a lot like Apt to me.
I'm not sure what you're wanting to compare? Linux, regardless of the
distro, is linux. The only differences (IMHO) are the install method
and the package management. Other than that they're 99.9% the same :)
Portage is a lot like apt. It was actually based originally on the BSD
ports system. Portage is in essence an apt that compiles packages (like
apt-source -b), but does it better, because it was designed to do do
source compiles/installs from the start, not binaries like apt was
designed to do.
There are other HUGE advantages though, two in my opinion anyway.
- USE flags. These give you control over what options are compiled
into a package. If you have a package that has a KDE and GNOME
interface and you only run GNOME, adding "-kde" to your USE flags
will make it so that when portage compiles the package it will only
compile the GNOME interface. The same goes for things like image
format support (png, gif, etc), network protocol support (ldap, snmp,
etc) and a host of other things. When you run from debian or redhat
you get whatever options the package manager has compiled in, unless
you want to go and edit things and rebuild yourself, or go off in
search of differently set up packages.
- The second is that because packages are only small .ebuild files
which define where to download and how to compile the source files,
portage stores all versions of packages in the tree. So in the gaim
package directory you have gaim-0.62.ebuild, gaim-0.70.ebuild, and
gaim-0.71.ebuild. While one of these packages is the "current" one
that is updated with emerge -u world, you can easily update to *any*
version that is available, simply by running "emerge <path to
ebuild>" where path to ebuild is the version you want. This means
you don't have to go hunting around for old RPM mirrors that haven't
updated yet, or try to figure which date the package was updated on
snapshot.debian.net
Oh, and no dependancy hell. You probably know what I mean if you've
been running redhat for any amount of time :)
Ok, enough rambling now!
--
Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://arcterex.net
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"There are only 3 real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and mountain
climbing. All the others are mere games." -- Hemingway
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