Ok gentoo people. I am thinking of switching from fedora to gentoo. would that be a bad thing? I don''t want to loose everything so would it be possible to save everything and do an upgrade ? I really hate having to download everything one by one and the portage system looks really cool. oh and say I installed the x86 version, but then bought an athlon xp and I wanted to change to the athlon xp version of gentoo. would that be a smooth transition? Is this distro buggy to where if you program stuff you have a greater chance of loosing it? How would you compare gentoo to fedora? or maybe even mandrake if you havn''t used fedora. In terms of gaming(I like to play games on linux), tools(i think gentoo has everything because you can just emerge it), is it stable??? thanks

quote: I am thinking of switching from fedora to gentoo. would that be a bad thing? I don't want to loose everything so would it be possible to save everything and do an upgrade ?

You can install portage on every linux distribution, but I would recommend a fresh install, because there would be many left-overs from the old one.

quote: oh and say I installed the x86 version, but then bought an athlon xp and I wanted to change to the athlon xp version of gentoo. would that be a smooth transition?

If you compiled everything for a Pentium 4 with SSE2, then it will not work on an Athlon XP, because it doesn't have that instruction set.
If you switch from a PII to a Athlon XP for example, you would change the CFLAGS in /etc/make.conf from march=pentium2 to march=athlon-xp and every new package you emerge will be compiled for Athlon XP. You can also recompile everything, but that would take very long

quote: Is this distro buggy to where if you program stuff you have a greater chance of loosing it?

No, it's very stable indeed.
There is a flag in /etc/make.conf that defaults to "stable" packages only. (GCC 3.2.3 is stable at the moment, if you change it to "unstable" you will get GCC 3.3.2). But you can also emerge unstable packages manually if you really want that version of a program

quote: How would you compare gentoo to fedora? or maybe even mandrake if you havn't used fedora. In terms of gaming(I like to play games on linux), tools(i think gentoo has everything because you can just emerge it), is it stable???

I don't know fedora, but it can't be badder, because you can install and do everything you want. For gaming there is a gaming kernel, that provides better performance. Everything will be compiled for your CPU and not for a generic one like in other distributions, which makes it much faster everywhere. Yes it's stable.

[edited by - noVum on November 23, 2003 5:40:04 AM]

thanks!

oh, and do you happen to know any good guides on installing it and stuff. I printed out the one on their site a while ago, but it's probably outdated now.

and if you emerge something, how do you know where it will install?

and also, where is the best place to download it because I know there are 3 stages, but at linuxiso.org they called the gentoo isos disc 1 and disc 2 instead of what stage it was. I am assuming it was stage 1 but I am not sure.

I downloaded the basic install x86 i386 for now, is that ok for an amd 700mhz? I forgot what it was called. I think it was an k6.

**oh, and can you install rpms if there isn't an emerge option for a program??


[edited by - HTML on November 23, 2003 10:58:45 AM]

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml

There is no K6 with 700Mhz, it has to be an Athlon or a Duron.

You should use the Athlon Live CD, not the generic 386 one

Linux programs are generally installed in /usr/bin or /bin so if you emerge something it will be globally available.

quote: **oh, and can you install rpms if there isn't an emerge option for a program??

You can emerge rpm, but it shouldn't be necessary. I never experienced that a program was not in the portage tree...

[edited by - noVum on November 23, 2003 11:09:20 AM]

thanks again, and are you sure there is no k6 with 700mhz because it''s not a chip... It''s a huge box thing, with a fan attached to the side. It is only temperary though until I get my 2000+ back.
I thought athlons were chips.

oh and would gentoo fit on a 1.5 gb hard drive? Just wondering because I want to keep this one working with fedora to see if I can even install gentoo on the 1.5. The install looks challenging. Hopefully they will make it a little easier in the future. Actually, about a year ago I tried to install gentoo and couldn''t do it after 3 days..so I am going to try again. I got stuck on the partitioning part, everything before that was easy.

If it's a box thing IT HAS to be an Athlon. This is a special packaging called Slot A, It was ONLY used for Athlons (not even for Durons)

There was a similar thing for Pentium II/III called Slot 1

quote: opefully they will make it a little easier in the future.

I don't think so, Gentoo is for people who know what they are doing.

quote: oh and would gentoo fit on a 1.5 gb hard drive?

Hardly. Without Xfree and Gnome/KDE yes.

[edited by - noVum on November 23, 2003 11:45:04 AM]

oh ok, cool. so does that mean I can install the athlon live cd and later upgrade to a athlon xp 2000+ with a different motherboard too?(Nfore K7N2 to be exact.) Right now it is some old fdc or something like that. It seemed windows had a problem when I switched motherboards so i just want to make sure.

noo, so I won't really be able to try it on 1.5 hd then...

[edited by - HTML on November 23, 2003 11:49:24 AM]

Linux should fall back to compatibility mode if the mainboard specific kernel components are not compiled in (IDE driver, AGP etc.)
If that doesn''t work you can compile a new kernel before you change the board

http://articles.linmagau.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=227

Gentoo isn''t faster. You just think it is. Placebo effect.