From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-09-11T14:47:15+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: What Linux distribution to choose for learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails

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Chad Perrin wrote:
> Gentoo "overlays" are a bit like Debian's "Experimental" package
> repositories -- less "stable" than Unstable.  I tend to avoid anything
> that hairy, though, because one of the reasons for using Unix-like
> systems in the first place (for me) was greater stability than some
> alternatives.

Oh yes ... overlays are definitely not without risk. I only run stuff
out of one -- the "science" overlay, which has the latest versions of
some fairly well-tested stuff like Maxima, TeXmacs, the Atlas libraries
and so on. I certainly don't run anything mission-critical like Perl,
Python or binutils out of an overlay.

> I think I've been lucky.  I haven't needed software from outside of the
> software management system of any Linux distribution (or FreeBSD, for
> that matter), other than wireless drivers to use with ndiswrapper or
> software run via Wine.

Not lucky -- your needs are more commonplace than mine. I use
highly-optimized chip-level numerical and symbolic libraries and
applications, play around with all the exotic languages, and just in
general try to break stuff that most folks can't even spell. ;)

Back in 1990 they told me I'd have a supercomputer on my desktop and I
scoffed. Well, the biggest thing you could get back then was around 10
GFlops, and that's just about what I get out of my dual-core Athlon64
right now. But the biggest thing you can get now is about a petaflop.
And so it goes ...
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