Smooth and Stable
October 27th, 2002 | by Tony Steidler-Dennison |Gentoo is in, Gnome is working (temporarily without anti-aliasing) and the normal user problem is solved. Never let it be said that I whimper at a challenge.
I like what I see of the portage system so far. This isn’t Debian or BSD, though it seems to have elements of both. There are no packages in the portage system. Everything that is downloaded is downloaded as source and built on the machine. That makes great sense in the context of Gentoo’s mission - to customize the builds specifically to your machine. It couldn’t be done with rpm or deb packages. There always has to be compromise somewhere when building for the masses. If I understand correctly, Gentoo tailors each build based on the USE variable in my make.conf file. That means that if I inserted gnome as part of the USE variable, each subsequent source build will happen, in part, with Gnome in mind. That’s a cool idea.
This is clearly a distro for those with some - maybe deep - Linux experience. I can’t imagine trying to walk through this with anything less than my current Linux experience. Even though the documentation on the site is strong, I reached several points during the install at which I was merely acting on instinct and experience. Without it, I’d have been hosed.
I’ll post some impressions over the next few days. Right now, I need to get Phoenix on the box and head for dreamland.
2 Responses to “Smooth and Stable”
By kasia on Oct 27, 2002 | Reply
I switched to gentoo myself very recently.. I really like portage.. I like gentoo a lot as well. It’s significantly faster than my previous (admitedly pretty old) RedHat install..
Installation was a *lot* of work and actually reminded me a lot of trying to get Slackware working back in 94 or so.. well worth the time spent, but I wouldn’t recommend it to someone with limited unix/linux exposure and no spare machine to use in the meantime. (I used stage 1, btw)
By Tony on Oct 27, 2002 | Reply
Yeah, it’s a difficult install. I, too, had a tough time with Slack a year or so ago, but ended up liking it very much. I suspect that I’ll Gentoo equally well. There’s something about the sweat equity that makes it that much better.
I’m running RH 7.3 on my “production” box. For all the obvious reasons (optimized builds and minimal install), the Gentoo box is considerably faster.