Quote: Original post by fyhuang
Gentoo ... takes a long time to install, and can be difficult to maintain, but otherwise it's not a bad distro.

Isn't that a contradiciton in terms?

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi

Quote: Original post by fyhuang
Gentoo ... takes a long time to install, and can be difficult to maintain, but otherwise it's not a bad distro.

Isn't that a contradiciton in terms?

Quite possibly, yes [grin]. I suppose how difficult it is to maintain depends on your Linux knowledge and stuff like that. Oh, and they now have a graphical installer (which was probably posted somewhere around here a while ago), which might make installation easier (but not shorter of course).

And I don't quite get what you want by 'installed with everything'. For example, I run SuSE 9.3 with my installation source as the SuSE FTP server... you could say that SuSE is 'installed with everything', but every time I install something I'm really downloading it from the Internet first.

Gentoo maintains a Portage tree, which you need to connect to use, but if you want you can download all the apps in an ISO before you install, so technically it can come with everything (or at least lots of stuff) too.

Cheers!

difficult to set up != difficult to maintain

Gentoo sounds like a good choice.

Yes, it's non-trivial to install, but if you have some computer experiance and can read--the install manual is wonderful--it's fine. You could also try the new installer, but I don't know how far along it is. Note also that it doesn't have to take forever: You can do a stage 3 install that uses mostly binary packages.

Gentoo is very easy to maintain and is one of the best for having frequent updates, since it doesn't need to compile its own packages. ~arch Gentoo has most releases from upstream quite quickly. Additionally, some packages have cvs ebuilds that can fetch the sources from CVS for the very latest whenever you want while still using the exceptional file/package management of portage.

Also, for a dev machine, you don't need to worry about crabbing the compiler or the -dev packages because you get them automatically when you install the library. Also, a set doc use flag usually means that installing the package installs all of its developer-related documentation. ( /usr/share/doc, man pages, ... )

Back, it's been fun at work, kinda killed my free time periods this week.

I got Gentoo's base installed, with the help of a friend (being able to run sshd during the install process is a very nice ability). Ultimatly I gave up once I got to trying to setup an Xserve. I swear Gentoo only for people that don't know when to cut their losses and just go another route. Hence now I'm giving Ubunutu a shot.

Ubuntu Install was alot smoother.
Currently working to get it to notice my ATI 8900, as it found and configured my ATI 7500 with no issues. (Well there seems to be a bit of tearing, but I'm currently writing that off to refresh rate and the KVM i'm using.