On Friday 12 May 2006 07:39, "Yuan MEI" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote about '[gentoo-user] Gentoo as a subsystem?': > Currently for newly shipped pc and mac, Operation systems are all > pre-installed
Not true. There are a number of companies that will ship you a computer without any operating system installed. > and for recovery, > warranty, support and convenience reasons, it's usually not a good > idea to re-partition the hard drive and install gentoo. *Shrug* I find I get much better support with Gentoo than I ever did with Windows. My warranty covers my hardware, not my software. It's more convenient (that is, I'm more productive) running Gentoo than Windows. As far as recovery goes, I've recovered from a corrupt initrd, some fat-fingering during a HW RAID upgrade, deleting the contents of /dev, LVM/device-mapper conflict, (2) occurances of glibc getting borked, and numerous other small problems -- most of those would spell R-E-I-N-S-T-A-L-L if I was running windows. So, I guess I'd have to disagree with you. It's for those very reasons that I'd blow away ALL partitions and install gentoo. (As opposed to resizing one and installing gentoo in the free space.) > So, is there any way to > embed the portage system into the already-installed system (in cygwin, > other version of Linux or BSD, OSX...), and keep its functionality. Portage and the portage tree should be installable on any unix-like system that has python and rsync available. 'Course, it's probably not going to do what your want... > My concern is that we normal users don't have to fight with the > hardware drivers, the strange software and hardware we have to use. > These stuff should be done by manufactures, and we purchased them when > we buy the computers. And drivers *by their very nature* are OS specific. You don't seriously think that there's a magic way for Gentoo to access hardware using a windows or mac driver, do you? There was some wrappers out there (like ndiswrapper) but certainly no generic framework. As far as Linux goes, you can always use the kernel (and modules) provided by your HW vendor. Just add a line or two to package.provided. > But we still need some freedom, some > controlablily with our own computers, and some fun, so we just embed > the favorite system into the pre-installed system, and use it. Maybe > windows with cygwin is not a good start, but OSX on mac should be. Is > there anyone would like to figure a way for this? I understand the sentiment. You want the HW support provided by your vendor, but you want the software tools provided by Gentoo/GNU/Linux. Might I suggest in the future you purchase your HW with Gentoo preinstalled? Also, you might want to become part of the solution by making HW suport in Linux better. Oh, you might also look into coLinux instead of cygwin, I think Gentoo support is better that way. -- "If there's one thing we've established over the years, it's that the vast majority of our users don't have the slightest clue what's best for them in terms of package stability." -- Gentoo Developer Ciaran McCreesh
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