On Saturday, October 11, 2003, at 07:55 PM, Bob Cober wrote:

> Just finished installing Gentoo on my second box and thought I would 
> post my impression of it:
>
> So far it is awesome.  I am really impressed and highly recommend it 
> to anyone who only wants specific software compiled specifically for 
> their system.  In a way, every Gentoo box is different and only 
> contains the software you want.
> The forums they have are also excellent.  I have found answers to 
> every issue I have had just by searching the forums.
> The Portage package system is amazing.  Just type 'emerge PACKAGENAME' 
> and it calculates all dependencies, downloads relevant source into the 
> main code tree on your system, compiles with your specific settings, 
> and installs.   For example, 'emerge mozilla ' or 'emerge xfree' and 
> 'emerge xmms'.
>
> If you are interested go to www.gentoo.org and try it out.
>
> I have definitely been converted.

I've got the 1st ISO downloading as we speak but one question comes to 
mind. Why do people run Gentoo rather than BSD? I always got the 
impression that Gentoo was trying to be FreeBSD. Then again, I don't 
know much.

My  other question concerns software that says it runs on Windows, Mac 
OS and Red Hat Linux. Believe it or not, I've run into two businesses 
that are dependent on such stuff in the last 2 weeks. I've never known 
whether the Red Hat reference means something like: 'This only runs on 
Red Hat. You'll be sorry if you try it on some other distro!' or if 
it's closer to 'We tested this on Red Hat. It probably runs on Debian 
and Gentoo as well but we were too lazy to find out. We think all our 
customers are on Windows anyway.'

What keeps me on Red Hat is just that so many companies wont support 
their software elsewhere.