Dear All, I am a newbie here, and I wonder if I might ask you a few questions about Gentoo. I've looked on the Gentoo website, but can't see answers to all of these.
Basically, I've now used Mandrake/Mandriva for the last 4 years, and become fairly proficient with it, but am considering that it is time to move (Mdv is getting increasingly non-free, and is also less transparent than it used to be; they also ignore bug reports!). Gentoo looks to me to be the best alternative, and I have already made frequent use of the excellent documentation eg on udev or dvd authoring. But before I jump into the unknown, I wanted to ask a few things. 1)My main machine is a laptop, so it doesn't really have either the disk space for sources or CPU power to compile everything kernel,X,kde,openoffice ...). Is there a way to do a binary install that will get me a fully working system within a few hours? Of course I want to learn gentoo "properly", but I'd prefer to do this from within a working system! 2)How exactly do gentoo security updates work? Under Mdv, there is a mailing list with announcements of which RPMs to install. If I have a binary-based distribution, will it be possible to keep it current? 3)Is there a relatively stable fork of gentoo with less frequent updates, or do I have to stay on the bleeding edge? Of course I want to get eg the latest kernel, or firefox, but I ran Mandrake Cooker for a while, with > 100MB of updates per day and all sorts of random breakage! 4)Does anyone know of a good resource for ex-mandriva users? Thank you very much for your help, Richard -- [email protected] mailing list
