[gentoo-announce] Gentoo Linux 1.0 released

[John (EBo) David]

Gontran wrote:
> 
> EBo care to testify?

oops... sory for the delay...  I get a couple hundred email messages a
day and sometimes things get placed on a BACK burner...

Brother EBo to the pulpit... Verily Brothers and Sisters ;-)

> > now and I'm digging it. I'm warming up to rpm a
> > little. I would like to see how the portage tree
> 
> If you're happy, why fix it?  Right. <hg>

rpm's, etc. are great, but what happens when you want to try something
out which depends on some latest and greatest version of whatever...  So
you go to upgrade those, and you find that you have 20 other things that
depend on that... before you know it you have spent a week rebuilding
the system to find that some critical tool you use every day now no
longer works because it has not been built using the latest and greatest
library.  UGGG...  This has happened to me in real life.

The alternative is to compile the new project from source.  Now you find
that it depends on 4 other things, you spend a day getting them all
compiled and running...  For paranoya I install such things in special
sub directories (like /opt/test/whatever) and after awhile you end up
having a couple hundred Gig or so of Junk you have no idea what is any
more...  Been there, done that, and still digging out ;-/

Portage and related tools sets up a semi automated way of dealing with
these issues by dealing with the dependancy issue up front and
recompiling everything from source.  The disaddvantage is that it takes
a LONG time to do an intitial install.  The up side is that once that is
done you have code that is optomized for your specific configuration --
ie it is as fast as you are likely to ever get.

> > performs though. Care to give your thoughts on this
> > distro :)?
> 
> In short: A good choice for the disgruntled.  Wicked easy to use, once you
> get past the install and used to the portage subculture, er, nomenclature.

When I first installed it a bit ago the install instructions were more
than a little scarry...  I even bothered print them out ;-)  but they
were printer unfriendly :-(

Once I got it basically up and running I noticed a noticable increase in
speed.

I must add that I do not have the configuration to the point where I
feel completely comfortable with it yet -- but that is mainly my
paranoya ;-)

The biggest problem I have at the moment is I pulled my floppy to fix my
mom's computer, and am VERY careful with doing anything with my
machine...  I currently have 7 or 8 different OS configurations that are
booted by LILO (SuSE63, SuSE71, SuSE72, RH72, GenToo0.99?,
WinNT40,Win2000Pro).  If I hosed everything now I would be screwd blued
and tatoo'd!  Because Gentoo jacks with \boot I set aside a seperate
boot partition for it, but LILO cannot deal with gracefully with booting
multipule boot particians...  Migrating to Grub would be fine except: if
I hose it I could be dead in the water without a currant floppy boot
image.  hhhmmmm....  does any one know how to write the equivelent to a
CD-RW ;-)  No seriously.

give me a little to finish up and post my virtual machine, finish
installing my mom's machine, steel back my floppy, etc., etc.  and I'll
report back more ;-)


  EBo --