Hello:

Santanu Chatterjee wrote,
> >> I felt that in order to even get into X, I needed to download the
> >> required packages from the net using emerge. 
> 
> >Yep. Thats how ports based distributions like *BSD and Gentoo work.
> >
> >[godzilla] /usr/ports/distfiles> du -sh
> >851M    .
> >
> >KDE, GNOME, X are the nasty ones to download!
> 
> Thats true but FreeBSD comes with many packages on the
> CDs, while Gentoo seems to come in only one CD.

The above holds true only for a point release. If you follow -STABLE or
-CURRENT, you will end up getting down src tarballs.

Gentoo "emerge" also has an option to download binary packages when
available. RTFM.

<snipped>
 
> >Once you are hooked onto ports, you are never gonna do an "rpm -ivh"
> >or an "apt-get install" ever again.
> 
> Umm..but I think when I was on FreeBSD, I did not like the ports way
> of downloading and installing a package. The reason is, whenever the
> connection got terminated untimely, on reconnecting, the package had
> to be redownloaded. So, I could never download any package greater
> than ~5MB under FreeBSD.

See "man make.conf" and look for "FETCH_CMD". Set it to your favorite
down loader.

> But, while under Woody, I used to install all the required packages
> from the CDs and then add the testing source line in apt.sources file.
> Then onwards, after doing an 'apt-get update'if I required a newer
> version of a package, then connecting to the net and doing an apt-get
> install did the trick. That apt-get supports resuming of downloading
> is a big plus point for Debian as far as I am concerned.

You are missing the point. FreeBSD and Gentoo are targeted at users who
do _NOT_ want to use pre-built packages.
 
> Someone at alt.os.linux said that Gentoo's emerge uses 'wget -c'.  If
> that is true, then I will probably try Gentoo at college.  At least, I
> won't have to pay the phone bill :-)

# setenv FETCH_CMD "wget -c"

-- Shanu
http://shankerbalan.com/

-- 
Linux Bangalore/2002
Technology for a Free World
December 3/4/5, 2002
http://linux-bangalore.org/2002


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