> Prior to this which distro did you use? I've used or experimented with, in reverse chronological order:
1.) Gentoo 2.) Sorcerer 3.) Debian Stable 4.) Redhat 5.) Suse 6.) Caldera 7.) Redhat 8.) Slackware 9.) Redhat 10.) Slackware (circa 1994) > What do you like about it? I remember the nightmare days of doing most things by hand under Slackware back in '94. The various commercial distros made things like X configuration much easier but I feel that it also removed some of the knowledge of how things work. I like knowing how things work, one of the tenets of open source right? :) (Maybe they didn't explicitly remove the knowledge but I was less driven to find out how things worked because a GUI could do it for me.) Many, many applications have "ports" for them. I've only found 1 application that I've wanted to use that hasn't been ported yet. (gnomemeeting) I plan on writing a port for it at some point if no one gets to it before I do. Some things I have working: KDE, XMMS, my TV Card with Xawtv, Mozilla, Apache, Mysql, Sun's JDK 1.4, SSH, NVIDIA accelerated drivers for X, among others.... > If I understand gentoo and Sourceror correctly, > they dont have any binary packages. You build > everything from source. Which I don't think would > be a problem if you have a fast machine and lots of > disk space. What appeals to me is that it claims > to be more up-to-date than the other distros. I > don't know how much more up-to-date it is than > Debian unstable though. Gentoo usually builds everything from source. But, in some instances that can't be done like for instance IBM's JDK or Sun's JDK because there's only a binary package. The day JDK 1.4 was released in a non-beta version I was able to "emerge" it under Gentoo. That's cool! :) In this particular instance, you have to download the installation file yourself but it will go through the process of making it a Gentoo installed package so that you can later uninstall it trivially. Maybe I didn't give Debian a fair enough chance but I've been very happy with Gentoo. The actual Gentoo experience might be more in line with Debian Unstable which I never tried so I can't compare. I just didn't like the word Unstable in it. :) Gentoo has the concept of unstable too. For instance, I'm running the most recent KDE2 but I could also be trying out KDE3 beta if I wanted (which I don't.) If you have a spare box lying around you should give it a whirl. I've been very happy. Hopefully you will be too! :) In case anyone wants to know: http://www.gentoo.org ISOs at: http://www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/snapshots/build/ build-ix86-1.0_rc6-r16.iso 15-Feb-2002 17:14 16.9M Yes that's right, 16.9MB for an ISO!!! :) -- jonathan rippy
