Lord Deathscythe Posted December 24, 2003 Report Share Posted December 24, 2003 I've been reading about Gentoo for a bit and I was wondering what exactly was the difference between Gentoo and distros like Mandrake and Red Hat. I have been looking at the installation guide and it seems rather complexe for someone of my admittedly low level. If I were to try to use Gentoo, what exactly would I get if I did that instead of Mandrake? I don't plan to anytime soon, but I am curious. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 24, 2003 Report Share Posted December 24, 2003 There are several good posts concerning gentoo in this forum. I used gentoo for perhaps 6 months. Pros: Since you build it on your system, you have an optimized linux for your system. Gentoo is easily kept updated with portage, their updating/installing program. Gentoo is as paowerful and flexible as Mandrake. Cons: The start-up is rather lengthy; it was 3 days before my system was running back on the internet with kde. You can install a simpler way, but if you don't boot-strap, you are not optimized. There are a few programs that are not gentoo friendly. If you like one of those, you might have a hard time getting it to compile on your machine. This is not comprehensive, but it is a start at giving you some ideas about gentoo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Deathscythe Posted December 24, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 24, 2003 So what do I have to do if I want to bootstrap it? If I pull off a seccessful Bootstrapping on this at stage 1 what can I look forward to? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 24, 2003 Report Share Posted December 24, 2003 Theoretically, everything is compiled from scratch on your machine, so your packages are all optimized. It sould be smoother and faster. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Deathscythe Posted December 24, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 24, 2003 Ok, so what about starting it up? If I want to install this on a Laptop what will I have to look forward to concenring things like PCMCIA, Wireless cards, Laptop configureations. And if I go on the Desktop will I be able to use my favorite Window Manager and have it boot directly into the GUI? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted December 24, 2003 Report Share Posted December 24, 2003 Put simply - you will be able to do anything you can do in any linux distribution, it'll just take more work (potentially much more work!) You can get all your laptop hardware going - but there's no wizard to help you configure it. The Documentation is very good and the gentoo forum is helpful, if not as friendly as this one. I have used gentoo for quite a while now and have occasionaly tried other distros - but always ended up coming back to gentoo. I like the way the distro works - the only thing that annoys me is that it can take a long time to install anything - it's all compiled from source. BTW - bootstrapping is very easy, it's a case of just setting the environment up (good docs for this) and runnin one command. The thing about bootstrapping is not the difficulty, it's just that it can take ages to complete... Worth doing though IMHO - if you're gonna do gentoo, you might as well do it right! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted December 25, 2003 Report Share Posted December 25, 2003 There are three ways to install Gentoo and the best way to describe them is to read about them on the Gentoo site. Count on spending a couple of days for the install if you choose the total compile method, but you will learn more than you can imagine and you will have a system tailored exactly to your machine. There are two less onerous methods and a live cd as well. Whichever method you choose, you will be getting an excellent distro that matches Debian in standards setting for quality and documentation. Counterspy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Deathscythe Posted December 25, 2003 Author Report Share Posted December 25, 2003 Doing a Gentoo install on the Laptop, and as of 1942 PST I have started the bootstrap script. So far so good. Took a bit to get to this point but I got some help from a friend. Does anyone here know how hard doing wireless is going to be in gentoo? I'd like to be able to use it if I can. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted December 25, 2003 Report Share Posted December 25, 2003 if you go to the Chat link at the top of the page and ask HJ he'll know. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted December 25, 2003 Report Share Posted December 25, 2003 You may find some help in my experience here Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest 1on1 Posted December 28, 2003 Report Share Posted December 28, 2003 Worth doing though IMHO - if you're gonna do gentoo, you might as well do it right! I agree; I dumped the first...Stage 3 Install...and started over. I wanted to increase the partition size also. I figured out how to do it all while being logged into my Mandrake 9.2 and I am doing an "emerge system" right now as I type. You'd never even know I am installing another distro...hardly any speed differential at all. And, I am on a 900 Mhz Athlon-tbird w/256M RAM and a 500M SWAP. B) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted December 29, 2003 Report Share Posted December 29, 2003 Well, everything has pretty much been covered, but to add my two cents: When I first tried Gentoo I hated it, because after the hours spent installing, some things were broken... I later tracked these problems down to hardware and discovered that Gentoo was not to blame. So I reinstalled it and learnt more about it and now I actually love Gentoo. The biggest plus for me is the portage system which is the best package manager I have ever seen, it is based on BSD's ports and works really well. Gentoo is also faster, because it compiles for your system. Plus, if you don't have time to compile everything from source, you can do a GRP CD install which utilises pre-built binary packages (once again, these have been compiled for your architecture). I could carry on all day.... check out www.gentoo.org for more info. CDs only cost $15 which is beyond reasonable. The only downside is the time spent compiling software, something like Gnome will take you a good few hours... but I use emerge -f to get the source and then I compile while I'm asleep/at work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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