Re: [Sheflug] Re: Gentoo Linux

[Tom Knight-Markiegi <tom [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

I'm goning to  have to add my vote for Gentoo, I've been using for about 6
months now, I used to run RH but didn't really like the way they're going. I
tried OpenBSD for a while, which made me learn at lot about *NIX very
quickly. I had to understand how everything really works, rather than just
having to know how to use the GUI wrappers for commandline tools. As I
needed Java 1.4 for uni, and it still didn't work with OBSD I decided to
move back to Linux. A friend of mine had tried Gentoo and suggested that I
tried it. So it was back to the good ol days of taking a week to install,
but at least I knew what what happening at every stage because I was doing
it all.

One of the best things about Gentoo is the Portage package management
system, much like BSD ports, just type emerge <packagename> and it will
download, compile and install the package and any dependencies, all with
settings that you've added so that it will be optimised for your hardware.
You can update your entire system to the latest stable version with one
command. It's definitely stopped me from messing things up by not really
knowing what I was doing when installing packages.

Gentoo has also got lots of other tools which prevent you from messing up
your system. rc-update lets you easily add services to your runlevels,
etc-update prevents you from overwriting updated config files and allows you
to interactively merge them. java-config lets you have different Java JDKs
installed and make sure the right one is used and the CLASSPATH is correct.

Another great thing about Gentoo is the support you get, the docs are clear
and informative and the forums are the nicest Linux forums I've seen.

Anyway you can probably tell that I like Gentoo by now so I'll stop.

Tom
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