On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 11:33:08PM -0800, Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 22:04, Dennis Allison wrote:
I'm not excited about converting to the RH Enterprise distribution and so am beginning to shop around for a different, a possibly better, distribution--something stable, well integrated, complete, and with a rational release cycle, stable SMP support, and support for AMD Athlon and AMD-64 processors. There are a number of candidate--Suse, Mandrake, Debian, etc.
Anyone care to document their experiences, good and bad?
I have nothing but good stuff to say about Gentoo. It's a bit different from Red Hat... the package manager actually works, for starters. :-)
I have also really enjoyed Gentoo. Just a few things to watch out for if you're accustomed to a binary-based distribution rather than a source-based distribution: 1) /usr needs a LOT of room. Maybe double what you are used to. 2) leave a lot of time for the initial installation. Even if you use a "stage 3" install which gives you a lot of things initially as precompiled binaries, you will probably end up leaving the machine alone for a long time to compile a bunch of stuff. I've now done a couple of gentoo installs and I have learned to start 2-3 days before i actually want to start using the box. That aside, there are things I really love about it: * emerge is every bit as easy as apt-get. * available versions of software are usually pretty recent. * there is a really easy way to tell the package manager, "I have installed software X on my own, don't complain about it being missing." No need to roll your own .deb or .rpm just to use a slightly different version of something. * It reboots REALLY fast. Much much faster than i've ever got redhat or debian to boot even after disabling most of the default services. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's THE EVIL YOGA INSTRUCTOR! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)