On 29 December 2005 17:24, Richard Neill wrote: > 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!
Look up "stage 3 installation" in the installation manual. BTW, follow the instructions precisely. ;-) > > 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? You cannot really stay current on binaries but you can gradually convert your binary installation to a self-compiled one. You said above that your *main* machine was a laptop with insufficient harddisk space and CPU power. That implies you do have at least one other box. You could keep the whole portage tree, including the sources, on that other box and nfs mount it. Alternatively, if that other box has got more CPU power, you can compile the whole thing there, tar everything (except the portage tree) up, boot the laptop from a livecd, get the tarball over and ... well ... untar it. ;-) That's what I usually do with a new box, so I don't have to start from scratch. > > 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! Forget about "updates" or "versions" with gentoo. It's a work in continuous progress. Every day, a little bit (and sometimes a huge bit) gets added, changed, improved. If you stay with stable ebuilds (the default) very little will break. I switched to "~86" (still under testing) early on, and it's still rare that things break. Usually, it's fixed the next day or just hours later. I had far more problems with SuSE. Gentoo is amazing when it comes to stability, performance and hassle-freeness. It is a wee bit heavy on bandwidth, especially if one sits on a modem connection like I do. To answer the question above: I don't know of any such beast. > > 4)Does anyone know of a good resource for ex-mandriva users? I don't know about that. Uwe -- Unix is sexy: who | grep -i blonde | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount sleep -- [email protected] mailing list
