Once you get over the initial hurdles, this is a really great distro. I'm back to the point where I was with jblinux or any of my earlier distros - everything (in my case that's sound card, cups printing, CD_RW, dhcp, xfce, minimal kde2.2, minimal gnome). I just need to copy over and install Opera. Now that I've won the battle to get cups up and going, I can really appreciate what jblinux had to offer in some respects (I could not get kde2.2 to work on jblinux, sadly to say). During the process I've learned to search for TFM in a lot of places and RTFM continually. It's been a positive experience. I've only had to ask my typical "dumb question" a couple of times. In one case (cups) the answer was "yeah, we haven't done that yet; why don't you do it and get back to us." Which is what I did - slowly. I've learned how to add boot scripts to the system - it's surprisingly easy. gentoo_rc6 has a simple but powerful dependancy based system. init points to a controlling script in /sbin. The detail scripts are in /etc/init.d. The detail scripts are invoked by symlinks in /etc/runlevels/boot, /etc/runlevels/default, etc. Each script has an optional dependancy section that is used to sequence the startup. I also had to figure out the hard way how to incorporate a logger into the system; they forgot to do this during install. Most of the elements were there, but "some assembly required." You get a choice of plain old sysklogd or a couple of others. I chose metalog, just to be different. The one quirk about metalog is that everything is buffered. If you need to tail -f the current log, you have to disable buffering temporarily. Like any 2.4.x+current glibc system, it's rock solid. Since gentoo are big users of python, I decided to give python a fling. I've got the tkinter extensions, and I've even built a few panels from scratch. It's not as easy as perl, but quite powerful. The OO stuff actually makes sense, unlike C++ or Java. There's one annoying bug I haven't resolved (it's probably not a gentoo thing); I'll cover this in a separate mail. Jump in, the water's fine. -- Collins Richey Denver Area gentoo_rc6 xfce+sylpheed _______________________________________________ http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives, Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, Etc ->http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
