Well, I haven't sent out any gentoo "propaganda" in a while, so here goes.
When I rebuilt my PC a couple of months ago (gave the wife my older, slower PC), I put up my favorites - FreeBSD, elx linux, and gentoo. I had a few problems with FreeBSD that I wasn't interested in pursuing, so elx became my day-to-day system. As in the past, elx installed without a hitch, but it is slightly slower than the average distro (totally subjective). With gentoo, I encountered nothing that I couldn't find a solution for, and I now have every piec of hardware and software that I'm interested in working flawlessly, so maybe others would be interested. gentoo has blossomed since the first of the year (daily traffic on the gentoo-users group is approaching unmanageable proportions). gentoo still intends, I believe, to release its 1.0 version sometime this month. Here are my results: 1) The install from ISO image burned to a CD works exactly like the instructions on the gentoo web site. The only wrinkle that took was related to tne NICs in my PC. I have two of them, but only one in use. The gentoo installer would not recognize the NIC attached to my lan as eth0; it was recognized as eth1. (Both cards are serviced by Tulip.) Fortunately, I had my favorite config availabel, because you need to build your own kernel. In the final network setup of the install, I selected dhscp and eth1 to be activated. After reboot and considerable weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I discovered that the regular linux kernel I had installed and the init scripts would only recognize the card as eth0!!! 2) Once I got the NIC working, it took a boring (everything worked) day and a half of compiles to get KDE 2.2.2, enough gnome stuff and mozilla for galeon, xfce, sylpheed, cups and gimp-print up and going. If I had it to do over, I would omit the gnome stuff and just use Mozilla which has 99% of what I like in galeon. 3) gentoo uses devfs, so you need to do a little bit of configuration work to get sound working for normal users and CDRW using ide-scsi. gentoo has the devfsd.conf file well documented with the appropriate lines to uncomment and tweak, but it took me a few days uf strugling to make them work. The key to it is this: if you modify/add items in the devfsd.conf, you need to delete any /dev/xxx entries related to the changes before shutting down. Once I did that, everything was copacetic. 4) cups worked for my printer (laserjet) right out of the starting gate. Audio sounds worked as sonn as I brought up a mixer. The concept of leaving the audio volume at zero until you mix it is the dumbest thing I've encountered in linux land, but that's certainly not a gentoo problem. cdrecord -scanbus works, so I presume my CDRW will work when I need it. I've adjusted /etc/group and /etc/fstab settings so that I can use the xfce built-in floppy and CD mount functions. I've installed aterm (lower overhead than xterm) and my preferred color settings. I've also loaded OpenOffice 641C, and it is working well. That's about it hardware and software wise. 5) Just personal evaluation (no proof), but everything seems to work quicker than on elx. 6) Even though I installed only a month or two ago, there are several changes waiting for the baselayout (init scripts, etc.). I'm not about to try this until I have cloned the system for backup. The one glaring flaw in the gentoo developer group (I've complained there) is that they like to make supposedly insignificant changes to the init scripts without testing them!!! Some of these changes are not so insignificant, and then you get "oops, I've fixed that now." 7) portage and its tools have improved considerably, although they did manage (again) to break portage a few days ago. Their concept of a freeze to prepare for release 1.0 seems to be a little different than mine. There are a lot of questions about portage, and the documentation and tools are scattered about the web site; you have to do a little bit of digging in the archives. 8) On the user group, most of the reported problems are newbie stuff (didn't do enough RTFM) and install for laptops (the pmcia blues just like on every other distro) which is a hit or miss proposition. Also a fair amount of DSL and PPPD blues, which is also quite familiar. 9) gentoo is fairly attentive to security exposures, but there's no finally version of an update process yet. 10) Summary: it's good enough for me. Grade B+ at least. -- Collins Richey - Denver Area - WWTLRD? Gentoo_rc6-15 2.4.17 - xfce + sylpheed + mozilla +OO641C _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
