> Maybe Chris could still do the Gentoo anyway as well - probably a bit of > interest in that (I know I am intrigued).
Unfortunately I can't be at the meeting on Thurday, so here's my take on Gentoo ( The Smallest Penguin btw ) I have only had Gentoo on my newly aquired machine, which is a 400MHz PII, more of less since I got it about 3 or 4 months ago. The reason I use it is because I desperately wanted to get out of the rpm dependencies jail into which the rpm distribs want to put you as soon as you want to change something. As an inveterate fiddler I find the fact that you cannot update your rpm files safely unless they are created by the distributor, and frequently not even then -- distributors who btw are just as able to err as the rest of us -- just so restrictive as to be irksome. For example I could not get Mandrake to upgrade successfully from 8.0 via 8.1 to 8.2 without a total re-install of the O/S. The source distribs, of which Gentoo is but one, just remove that restriction. That's the main reason, the others are that the Gentoo team don't add their own 'features' to the apps, you get what the progams' authors intend you to have. Upgrading an app is as simple as saying: emerge rsync emerge app emerge clean and Gentoo takes care of everything. Even upgrading the glibc because of the recent overfow bug is done in exactly that way. The Gentoo distrib. is well documented at the right level for me. The Gentoo Team take a _great_ deal of care to get it right, you only get loaded onto you computer what you ask for. You are in control of what goes onto you machine. Need I say more? Only to say that while the initial setup process is improving all the time, it's really not aimed at the newbie. ( Unless you can compile a Kernel successfully, don't even nightmare about installing Gentoo all by yourself! ), but once the system has been installed initially, any newbie / fool / halfwit can use it and keep it up to date. The whole point of Gentoo is simply that you can set the machine's exact architecture into a config file and the binaries you generate will be optimised especially for your machine. No stupid nonsense such as running old style i386 binaries on your latest and greatest machine when it's got the very latest, and under those circumstances, totally wasted, extended instruction set. For the whole story I'd suggest looking at the web site, paying particular attention to the links down the LHS of the page. http://www.gentoo.org/ ps Is this kind of thing ok going to the list? Or would you prefer it to be on a web site, with just a pointer url in the e-mail? -- Sincerely etc., Christopher Sawtell
