thelinuxlink.net

Isn't stage-3 an all binary installation?

AFAIK the gentoo installation slowness is a myth, there are optional routes during installing that might make it slower since is compiling but portages are usually fast.

There are other stuff like http://home.iprimus.com.au/elmo198/ to get running with Gentoo.

A cool way to SEE gentoo is on system trash available here:
http://systemtrash.com/episode_archive_ ... dback.html

You can do a stage 3 install of Gentoo, and use only binary packages if you want. On the x86 live CD, there are precompiled binaries for GNOME, Firefox, OpenOffice, XMMS, MPlayer, etc. It's possible to get a Gentoo system up in less than 2 hours, but you'll spend atleast 12-15 hours afterwards updating all your packages from source with Portage. I wouldn't recommend running Gentoo on anything under 1Ghz/Pentium 3/4, or you'll be waiting a few days.

RR64 is a nice polished distro that will get you up and running in no time, unfortunately when I tried it, it crashed before I could fully install it.

I think it is disgusting how much hate people have for Gentoo, they made a choice different than most other and stood by it. It makes me sick when there have been flames and such over your choice of distro, desktop environment/window manager, and hell even text editors! We should be working on making it all better instead of being deconstructive. (I was not talking about anyone specifically because I have seen it in many places)

I try to be open minded, sure sometimes I can be a fanboy but I try as hard as I can to be accepting.

CptnObvious999 wrote:I think it is disgusting how much hate people have for Gentoo.

Well, I think Gentoo has done its fair share of pissing off potential new users with its compiling, and difficult configuration. There's people out there like us who enjoy the challenge, and then theres others who absolutely hate it.

Well in 1999-2001 I remember that most didstros were focusing on friendly but if you want L33T linux distro you will use debian and/or slackware. Since apt-get everyone was like debian is so user friendly, so is definetly a change of culture.

Gentoo is l33t exactly cuz not anyone is up to the challenge, and using gentoo for server enviroments will make it really useful and porpously the best distro. If you use generic hardware it might not be so much impact but if you are using mainframes or really big iron, a hardware optimization might play a huge part on the performance.

If you want to stick gentoo on the desktop it offers that choice, but then again why you want to make it be another suse-debian-fedora? Gentoo people really have some other targets in their mind as make it a bubble gum distro.

I am really more exciting about minimalistic distros really taking it to the extreme, I mean distros that use Tiny-X, uClinux or Trinux to make it squeeze into old PII with no hassle.

We all heard how dan struggled squeezing DSL which is not really an optimized distro, it is small but is not as small as it should since a whole deploument of X11 might make any distro play fat cow.

Jza wrote:Well in 1999-2001 I remember that most didstros were focusing on friendly but if you want L33T linux distro you will use debian and/or slackware. Since apt-get everyone was like debian is so user friendly, so is definetly a change of culture.

exactly. Now if someone where to improve the installer, make the packages binary, make the use flags as binary patches and apply them depending on your settings, and have all the packages optimized for each specific CPU, and run all the maintenance scripts (the messages at the end of the ebuild) then it would be a pretty good noobie distro and provide the same amount of power. Right now it is perfect for those who know what they are doing.