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Perhaps Gentoo - SOLVED


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I'm made my mind up to remove XP pro once and for all and installing an another linux distro on my computer. I was thinking of Gentoo because i've heard all the packages is very up to date when someyhing new is released.

 

Then this pop up to mind, how diffrent is Gentoo to Mandrake, any diffrences at all than the name?

 

 

 

 

.:=The AI Dude=:.

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gentoo is totally different from mandrake. it is very difficult for newbies imho.

 

it is known as an expert-distro. i tried it once and somehow i wasn't able to compile everything the way it should. two days of compiling resulted in a formidable crash. you should really know a lot about how linux works before switching to gentoo or slackware or arch imho.

 

if you are still interested in gentoo but don't want to compile everything i would recommend vidalinux. it is a somewhat easier-to-handle version of gentoo. :)

 

if i were you, i would try other distros first. go to distrowatch and take a look at the big bunch of distros they have linked there.

 

also: keep in mind that there are as many different distros as there are usages for linux. think a bit of what you really want/need. don't grab a distro because some say "it is cool". they have usually another usage/other expectations for their linux-distro than you.

Edited by arctic
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gentoo is much harder than mandrake but still a very good distro. The big problem with it is that all apps are compiled from source - this means that the average install takes a few days.

 

Arch may be another one to consider. It's very up to date and installs using binaries which make for a quicker install. It is also an "expert" distro though...

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Gentoo is not that hard to install at stage 3... just follow the steps and you are done.

 

Compile time take awhile, but once you have it installed getting the latest packages for whatever is cake.

 

If you already have a linux on one of your harddrives I'd suggest using that extra hard drive for something else like FreeBSD or openBSD

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I'd go for stage 1 personally. I did, in fact, on my very first attempt to install gentoo. You can learn from my mistakes here

 

The only challenging bit really is the kernel compile. But this is actually a great learning expereince for you - try it a few times until you get it right. If you screw up then you can use the gentoo CD to boot into your system and try again.

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Take that partition and give new distros a try. One thing I'd do before playing with distros too much is learn how to use grub as a bootloader--in my experience it is much easier to boot multiple distros with grub than lilo.

 

With a computer that fast, gentoo's compile times won't be all that big a deal. It'll definitely take a while to get up and going with the initial install, but the day to day usage shouldn't be that bad. Go with phunni's advice on the stage 1 install. The install docs at gentoo.org are among the best docs I've seen.

 

I moved to gentoo in the past month. After a year with Mandrake I was ready to get my hands dirty and try something new. For me, it's actually much easier to find software with gentoo than it was for Mandrake. With urpmi I had to worry about constantly adding new sources or downloading third party rpms (which frequently didn't work well). Portage has virtually everything I've looked for and everything installs seamlessly. For the long-term, I like the fact that gentoo doesn't have to be reinstalled to be kept up to date. With mandrake I had to reinstall every 6 months to keep up to date. This is going to be a problem for commercial distros because it's harder to make money if nobody has to re-buy your product :(

 

The software in gentoo's portage tree also seems to be less "tinkered-with" than mandrake's software, so it all seems to work together more smoothly. I can't really explain it, but things seem to break less frequently than they did in Mandrake.

 

Gentoo's definitely worth trying. It's got a big community of users out there so you can feel confident that if you come upon any problems, someone else has seen the problem and probably worked to fix it already, which is nice.

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  • 4 weeks later...

peep: what do you find is missing in the combination of main, contrib and plf? I don't ever find much missing and if I do it's something pretty small which is easy to compile from source.

 

if being up to date is what you're interested in, other options are Debian sid (combined with experimental) and Mandrake Cooker, Mandrake's development distro, which is *very* fast at getting new software outside of beta and community -> official periods.

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Its always god to try new distros but be careful of getting in too deep....

 

make sure you have the time to learn the required level for that distro else it will just sit there and possibly be a bad impression...

 

If you fancy something new but pre-packaged then I find hard disk installs of kanotix very quick and easy and it has almost exactly what I would do myself from a Debian netinstall. Its got GUI tools as frint ends to normal Deb scripts wihich IMHO is much better than the MCC which does everything its own way....

Id say it is a good bridge to getting your hands dirty and you have the apt repositories for almost everything you want.

 

Ubuntu seems a popualr way into debian too if you want Gnome and youlll certainly be able to get help here with so many people giving it a whirl....

 

Im trying gentoo and its not that hard, but you do need time to follow stuff through...Im sure my second install will be smoother :D

Personally I think if you are going gentoo - go gentoo not vidalinux...

90% of my reasoning for gentoo is learning experience...

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gentoo is much harder than mandrake but still a very good distro.  The big problem with it is that all apps are compiled from source - this means that the average install takes a few days.

 

Arch may be another one to consider. It's very up to date and installs using binaries which make for a quicker install.  It is also an "expert" distro though...

If you're installing it on an older PC it's acsually great to compile from source because then the programs takes full advantage of the specific system's hardware.

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uh?...this thread still alive?

 

ehrm...I choosed not to install Gentoo for the time being, I think I need some more "experience" and knowledge. Instead I've installed Ubuntu 4.10 as my 2. linux distro as a play ground for experiments and stuff I want to try. Though the wise says that ubuntu is made for the none-konsole, but I can't stop using console (it's much easier sometimes).

 

Thanks for the input guys and girls :)

 

 

Cheers :beer:

 

 

.:=The AI Dude=:.

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Guest David Gypsy

I run Mandrake10 on my desktop and Suse9.1 on my laptop, it took me a long time and much experimenting to get to where I am now. (These just work for me on these different machines and feel comfortable, and I can get some work done.)

 

My advice is to try out as many as you want until you find one that suits you and then use that one. Distros are cheap and harddrives are large enough to take a few at a time. At least you will get good at partitioning your hard drive and you will know about a variety of distros, this is good for impressing your friends! :D

 

But once you decide, stick with it, otherwise you just keep playing and dont do any work! :zzz: But maybe that is good too. In fact, maybe Ill try this Ubuntu Im hearing about.

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