[wplug] Gentoo is so nice..

[Scott F. Kiesling]

I've been running Gentoo since the end of last year (on the advice of
WPLUG!) and I absolutely love it. I have learned more about Linux
without being frustrated (because of the Genoo community, which is as
generous and helpful to noobs as WPLUG), and my system runs what *I*
want it to run, and nothing more. I previously had a Debian distro
(after Red Hat, where I started), and I liked that too, but I really
like the customization of Gentoo. And, as I said, the helpful on-line
community, mainly in the forums.
SFK

On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 14:08, John Strange wrote:
> Well..
> 
> After working with redhat 9 for a week and working around most of the
> problems, all of them in fact I still felt it was not very nice.  Gnome
> still felt very very sluggish, apps took a while to start.  In general I
> really used to like redhat but their last few releases are really
> starting to make me wonder why...
> 
> Insert Gentoo Linux: (http://www.gentoo.org)
> 
> I had once installed Gentoo for about 6 months, and it was really nice,
> so I decided to try again..  Gentoo is what I would consider not a
> *VERY* friendly linux choice, but it's VERY fast.
> 
> The stage1 install is the ultimate in customization, it compiles
> everything on your system from source code.  You can define global
> optimizations for your system.  There are multiple stages, 3 to be
> exact, each one offering
> 
> I chose somewhat agressive optimizations:  -03 -march=pentium3
> 
> Now, gentoo is NOT an hour long install, the install is pretty intensive
> and can take a while to do.  I would say I spent 12 hours compiling
> software, they do apparently have bin packages now, but I chose to
> install them through compiling each package.
> 
> Now the time it takes to install is a bit much, but the instructions are
> rather straightforward with some more difficult parts such as installing
> grub by hand, or creating an fstab by hand.  It's something though that
> once you do you may understand other things that were hidden by GUI's or
> whatever.
> 
> After the install and X built and everything that I wanted I was
> presented with a system that while running X would do a few following
> things:
> 
> Start Evolution in 4 seconds
> Start Mozilla in 3 seconds
> startx in about 8 seconds
> gcc 3.2
> xfree 4.3
> kernel 2.4.20 with nice patches (you can use stock kernels if needed)
> /devfs (interesting change)
> 
> To say the very least I'm not an owner of a very fast linux system, that
> is very nice, and optimized to the point of anal retention! :)  If you
> are bored and getting tired of people telling you gnome has to be
> sluggish give gentoo a try, you'll be suprised and hooked at the same
> time.
> 
> - John
> 
> _______________________________________________
> wplug mailing list
> wplug at wplug.org
> http://www.wplug.org/mailman/listinfo/wplug
-- 
Scott F. Kiesling

Assistant Professor		
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Linguistics		kiesling at pitt.edu
University of Pittsburgh, 2816 CL	Phone: 412-624-5916
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA		Fax: 412-624-6130

http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/skpage.html