From: MikkelFJ Date: 2003-02-11T05:16:05+09:00 Subject: Re: The way of the Gentoo "Tom Sawyer" wrote in message news:200302101157.19469.transami@transami.net... > so i 'd like to know more about your expeirence with Gentoo. is it going well? Well - our mails crossed but to give you a resume: I required wireless network to run otherwise I might well have been happy. I failed after many attempts although it work for others (and even mine until reboot). My first kernel booted fine except the wlan issue. Later kernels failed after a reinstallation but that is hardly gentoos fault - it's generic Linux and my lack of expertice. On Gentoo you can do a basic install in a couple of hours, but you should choose a stage2 install because stage3 will upgrade lot's of stuff anyway. It takes a long time to compile, that's how source works especially on older hardware. My intial attempt at stage2 was before KDE 3.1 went out. Now the network is too slow for a couple of weeks I guess (5-14KB/s where I should have 100KB/s). I would not discourage you from choosing Gentoo - I's a great community (also visit IRC and forums to get an idea of the potential problems people deal with). However, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and you spend a lot of time trying combinations where each combination takes of lot of time. Some people have tried weeks worth of kernel builds while others are happy users. Generally the spirit of Gentoo is better than elsewhere in Linux (An IRC'er wrote: "why is Gentoo the nicest freenode channel?" This reminds me of comp.lang.ruby and you should always choose a tool based on the quality of its users). You might actually catch a dead Gentoo-ist with a FreeBSD system as well - an anomaly in the usually heated OS wars - this could be down to the heritage from the FreeBSD port system or that the community generally has an open mind (again like Ruby). The documentation is fairly good and you learn a lot about Linux (making it good even for newbies like me). The portage system lets you upgrade and downgrade as you choose and I have easily grabbed a few tools that way. However, I suspect some flaws in the portage system prevented my wlan working after having done something wrong early in the install hence I tried to reinstall but misconfigured the kernel during the operation and decided enough is enough - no more kernel builds. If you are into Linux and don't mind kernel rebuilds I would recommend to give it a shot - decide how much time you'll spend and perhaps it works out great. You will probably spend some time maintaining the system as new software may fail and require downgrading again where Debian is more conservative (I haven't tried Debian). More generally on my Linux experience for anyone who cares - no flame intended I'm trying to be as objective as possible while truthful to my own subjective impressions. I entered Linux with an open mind (this happens with 3 year intervals). Also I'm a bit annoyed with Windows features - notably the support of Posix, SSH and much fewer freely available apps.: Verdict: I think Linux is hyped - its no more stable than Windows, it's just that (quoting a BSD user) everything on Linux is a "hardware error" - I smiled when reading it, but later realized that he was right. There are incredibly many "hardware errors" discussed in the Linux forums. In reality it's a lot of slightly different drivers that should have been merged to a single driver which in turn should have more intelligent sensing and be properly debugged - Linux is a lot duplicated incomplete work from drivers through distributions. This is why people compiles kernels over and over - or in the case of RedHat you either happen to have it working or not (granted, a lot works). And in case of FreeBSD this is why my network went online immediately - they have their drivers integrated. I do believe the Linux kernel is evolving faster than FreeBSD. FreeBSD is very late with thread support and FreeBSD should enter the XFS filesystem. You could also argue that Linux is very late with proper VM btw.. khttpd kernel level http server is fairly kewl in Linux - I'm not aware of equivalents in *BSD. However, in the end of the day it's much easier to get a relatively safe FreeBSD server running and kick it around until it also goes multimedia than the other way around. Major downside with FreeBSD is that it is poorly supported commercially (how ironic). Arkeia has Linux but no BSD server. Ditto Oracle. Professionally I develop on Windows but feel I should also get acquainted with Linux. However, as things are, I can't be bothered. I'll pick something that works for my server so I have a server, Windows 2K or some variant of *nix where I can test posix stuff and get SSH - which currently leads me to FreeBSD. One last thing for FreeBSD: I've got an older laptop for the purpose so fulltime X-desktop is not the primary purpose - with an 1.8 Athlon and lots of RAM I might choose different. I need the sound because I'm supposed to use the 40GB disk for something so hopefully I manage that. Oh - and Microsoft policy aside - Windows really is much better than it's reputation. Given how much banging I've given my dev. machines, it's a very long time since I've got the systems down (but you need a few service packs to get there) and the remote desktop on XP seriously rocks. I might also add that a lot of complaints about Windows is due to writing non-portable *nix code rather than lack of functionality in Windows (Ruby works mostly great on both platforms) - that said it's too bad Windows does not support Posix. Windows network browsing is crappy btw. Can't browse network from home - I can only use known servers - very old crappy protocol indeed - oth - not sure you have an equivalent feature on Linux at all (save LDAP). Mikkel