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...he'd just have to RTFM

The documentation is out there, just the problem that people don't read them!

Harden your server!

emerge package

This is part of the reason I love Gentoo...

# emerge -v xmms licq iptables

And if you've not done it already, emerge webmin (for easy firewall config) and get ALSA working. Gentoo's perfect documentation makes ALSA setup a breeze.

Well, as I said, the default Gentoo kernel build didn't support it, but the following HOWTO gave me the info I needed to patch the kernel with a custom DSDT override. Everything works great.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=122145

The ACPI4Linux project which was mentioned in the gentoo forum post above was where I ended up finding the most info about the problem

http://acpi.sourceforge.net/dsdt/

But why couldnt they squeeze in 2.6.4 at the time they were getting ready to relese the ISOs'? I used to be a Mandrake user, but I got sick of the fact that once you install, there are no easely automated ways to update yoyr software. I use Gentoo, primarily because I think portage (I also use FreeBSD ;)) is the best thing since sliced bread. I also have the 2.6.5 kernel thanks to portage, and USB 2 support is better then ever.

I really think Mandrake, LLC (or what is it?) should concider using a different package/software manager in future releases. This gentoo forums post even describes how to install the superb portage on other distros.

Anyway, someone feel free to correct me or mod me down.

But why couldnt they squeeze in 2.6.4 at the time they were getting ready to relese the ISOs'? I used to be a Mandrake user, but I got sick of the fact that once you install, there are no easely automated ways to update yoyr software. I use Gentoo, primarily because I think portage (I also use FreeBSD ;)) is the best thing since sliced bread. I also have the 2.6.5 kernel thanks to portage, and USB 2 support is better then ever.

I really think Mandrake, LLC (or what is it?) should concider using a different package/software manager in future releases. This gentoo forums post even describes how to install the superb portage on other distros.

Anyway, someone feel free to correct me or mod me down.

There's no need to wait several years, Linux is already ready for the desktop. If you don't believe me check out Mephis, Knoppix, or Xandros.

I presonally prefer Gentoo Linux becouse of the freedom you have in choosing what applications you want on your computer, though for a noob, it is a bit daunting.

If you only want to regularly check for the important security updates, other than minor bugfixes, feature upgrades etc

there's a new experimental feature, GLSA only updates

Basically, it's a script that only pulls in the updates that warrant a gentoo linux security announcement.

It's still worth doing an emerge -puvD world every so often though ;)

Sounds like you want glsa-check.

Not quite perfect yet, but getting closer.

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

I'd be a debian user, also, except for gentoo(www.gentoo.org). All the advantages of FreeBSD, without having to wait for them to finish 5.0

A couple of points:

begin rant

Gentoo is not "for system admins." Sure, it's a pain to set up the first time, if you're a Linux n00b (which I am), but once it's going, it's fantastic. I've been through the gamut of Linux distros in the last 6 months (SUSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Arch, Debian, Slackware, Mandrake, and finally Gentoo), and you couldn't make me switch back to anything else. Like they say in their documentation, once you've recompiled your kernel a few times, you'll forget that it used to be hard.

Along with that, if you have a standard sound card, that'll usually be picked up by one of the precompiled kernels that you'll use (this is for pretty much any distro, not just Gentoo). When you compile the new kernel, sure, you have to make sure you compile support for it, but that's not a big deal, especially if you have a good set of directions.

You know, it's not always easy right out of the box - I know I had my problems when I first started, but once you get it configured the way you want, you'll never go back to Windows again (unless you're a big-time gamer, because WineX is spotty, at best).

end of rant

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

I've been fond of Gentoo Linux's XML based markup language. Without any prior knowledge of XML, I was able to modify and extend it to meet my needs. It may make a good baseline for you to start with.

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

me too :)

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

As a note, SuSE, despite their marketing claims, is not the first distribution to go to market with a commercial 2.6 kernel. This Beta is for a product that will offer the 2.6 kernel, however Gentoo is already selling Gentoo 2004.0, and Mandrake is selling copies of Mandrake 10 Community on DVD.

I don't know how SuSE defines "commercial" or "first", but if other distros are selling copies before SuSE even has released 9.1, then I'd have to say their marketing campaign needs to be revised ;)

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

well. Its Netgear. The same netgear that says that their Gig-E cards don't support multiple network connections.
*cough*

http://dev.gentoo.org/~spider/netgear.txt

Well, as they state themselves :
http://gentoo.org/~spider/netgear.txt

• In windows we have a control panel called "add/remove programs" and it helps us to manage the software that is installed, and the the components of our operating system. In linux we have rpms, debs, ebuilds, etc that we have to work hard to find out how to use. We have no way of creating programs commercially and installing them well. Many of the cited thousands of programs on sourceforge and freshmeat resemble the shareware of win95 found on tucows and download.com. I wouldn't use that software for most things and I'm skittish about using anything I can't buy in a box, with a user's manual and an installation guide. I might not ever use them, but a man page, or the author's sparse quotes on the web aren't usually enough for me. Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying add-remove programs is all good, but I sure think it would be a step in the right direction.

• Samba is an awesome product and I'm really happy to see the huge improvements in it since I started working with it some years ago, but working with it on the client side is almost always torture, the best implementation of it are using it within konqueror and nautilus, and they use the non-mounted/mapped style, rather than the quicker, connection based session style, and use more bandwidth and are slower. This needs to be fixed

• WE all hate the windows "we'll tell you how you'll do it" feeling but a lot of our friends and parents and non-geek specifically don't mind being told how they do it; at least they'll be able to do it. We need there to be a big switch we can throw somewhere where we can switch between these UI modes. It's really daunting to sit down at a computer and want to play solitaire, and you just don't know how, even if I can do it 300,000,000 ways (3hun mil) ways.

I've been using Postfix www.postfix.org as mine. I just recently put Gentoo on a Sun box I got off eBay to dedicate as my email server. Here are some links to some info I used:

Virtual Mailhosting with Postfix

Email system for the home Network

And I found many of the links from www.postfix.org useful. I also went and bought the Postfix book from O'Reilly, and man, did that help!! It gives good explanations on how things all work....and it provided the glue between all the online materials I used. I'd highly recommend it. The home setup is much easier, but, I went for the virtual hosting system this time, not only to be more 'industrial' but, for the learning process.

HTH

I've been using Postfix www.postfix.org as mine. I just recently put Gentoo on a Sun box I got off eBay to dedicate as my email server. Here are some links to some info I used:

Virtual Mailhosting with Postfix

Email system for the home Network

And I found many of the links from www.postfix.org useful. I also went and bought the Postfix book from O'Reilly, and man, did that help!! It gives good explanations on how things all work....and it provided the glue between all the online materials I used. I'd highly recommend it. The home setup is much easier, but, I went for the virtual hosting system this time, not only to be more 'industrial' but, for the learning process.

HTH

I understand that most distros come with a packaging manager, but if I want to write a program, allow downloads from my site, then (to the best of my knowledge) there's no way for it to easily be installed and have menu shortcuts etc set up....

"Menu shortcuts setup..."? ok, for what? KDE? Gnome? Fluxbox? Afterstep? The reason there is no universal "installer" is that there can be no assumptions made about how a person chose to configure the system, since the advantage here of course is having a CHOICE. It's a bout having the FREEDOM to configure things the way that works best.

Of course you are also free choose Redhat/RPM and install software which makes assumptions based on that Redhat system and how someone at Redhat decided your system should be configured. That's perfectly acceptable.

If you want full freedom and flexibility, source code is the only way. For me personally, building from source works best for me, you however are free to CHOOSE whatever works best for you. But PLEASE don't say that every UNIX system out there should conform to meet some standard so that a single software installer will function correctly on all of them. Now THAT is is just ridiculous.

My suggestion. Develop your software. Use standard tools like autoconf, automake, etc. Then allow distribution maintainers to develop packages based on your source distribution. If you want to push the process along, for something like gentoo you could very easily write a small ebuild and submit it to them to include in portage. It's also fairly easy to make RPMs.

I understand that most distros come with a packaging manager, but if I want to write a program, allow downloads from my site, then (to the best of my knowledge) there's no way for it to easily be installed and have menu shortcuts etc set up....

"Menu shortcuts setup..."? ok, for what? KDE? Gnome? Fluxbox? Afterstep? The reason there is no universal "installer" is that there can be no assumptions made about how a person chose to configure the system, since the advantage here of course is having a CHOICE. It's a bout having the FREEDOM to configure things the way that works best.

Of course you are also free choose Redhat/RPM and install software which makes assumptions based on that Redhat system and how someone at Redhat decided your system should be configured. That's perfectly acceptable.

If you want full freedom and flexibility, source code is the only way. For me personally, building from source works best for me, you however are free to CHOOSE whatever works best for you. But PLEASE don't say that every UNIX system out there should conform to meet some standard so that a single software installer will function correctly on all of them. Now THAT is is just ridiculous.

My suggestion. Develop your software. Use standard tools like autoconf, automake, etc. Then allow distribution maintainers to develop packages based on your source distribution. If you want to push the process along, for something like gentoo you could very easily write a small ebuild and submit it to them to include in portage. It's also fairly easy to make RPMs.

I suggest checking out the major GNU/Linux distros that use the RPM system. Mandrake looks particulary good for someone abandoning Redhat.

Of course, I use Gentoo; so this is pure speculation. ;)

It basically does all those things for you with a single command . . . but better yet, it goes ahead and does all those things with all of the dependencies for your package, too. It's amazingly easy.

For example, once you have a barebones Gentoo system up and running, you can run

emerge kde

and it automatically builds all of the dependencies (including X) and all of KDE in one go. 'Course it takes all night to do so, but what do you expect when you're building from source with your own optimizations.

People have built something like 6500 packages to work this way with Portage; so far almost everything I've needed has been there. Here's the list. You can always install software manually too if you want/need to.

I thought the gentoo folks did a pretty good job explaining what the use flags are but I understand what you're saying. Just because it's explained doesn't mean people are using them.

I think half the people using Gentoo have no business using it.

I'm curious, what distro would you recommend instead? Maybe a meta distro of the GRP that defaults to prebuilt optimized packages?

http://gentoo.org

Satisfy both your needs.

my favorite example is that you have to link the correct timezone files by hand, instead of choosing your timezone out of a list.
I'll bet you my next month's salary i can type

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/GMT /etc/localtime

on my Gentoo box before you can use whatever gui list tool you use with your mouse.

Besides that what do you think `ls /usr/share/zoneinfo/` gives you anyway? A fucking list to choose from, imagine that!

I can only guess that you either
a) don't know your own timezone or
b) think making a simple link is hard work.

Please, go back to Mandrake or whatever you use. Leave Gentoo to those of us who actually want to be more than an ordinary Linux user.

All you anti-Gentoo people really piss me off with all your whining. If you don't like Gentoo then don't use it..

Oh yeah and Gentoo is not a little distro at all, it has over 6500 packages available for emerge.

From GLSA:


Multiple security vulnerabilities in Apache 2

A memory leak in mod_ssl allows a remote denial of service attack against an SSL-enabled server via plain HTTP requests. Another flaw was found when arbitrary client-supplied strings can be written to the error log, allowing the exploit of certain terminal emulators. A third flaw exists with the mod_disk_cache module.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

UUDeview MIME Buffer Overflow

A specially-crafted MIME file (.mim, .uue, .uu, .b64, .bhx, .hqx, and .xxe extensions) may cause UUDeview to crash or execute arbitrary code.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

Multiple remote buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Courier

Remote buffer overflow vulnerabilites have been found in Courier-IMAP and Courier MTA. These exploits may allow the execution of abritrary code, allowing unauthorized access to a vulnerable system.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

Multiple remote overflows and vulnerabilities in Ethereal

Mulitple overflows and vulnerabilities exist in Ethereal which may allow an attacker to crash the program or run arbitrary code.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

oftpd DoS vulnerability

A remotely-exploitable overflow exists in oftpd, allowing an attacker to crash the oftpd daemon.

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

Buffer overflow in Midnight Commander

A remotely-exploitable buffer overflow in Midnight Commander allows arbitrary code to be run on a user's computer

For more information, please see the GLSA Announcement

And yet, Slashdotters will continue to make fun of IIS...

official gentoo distcc guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml

My life changed the day i found out i could get my super fast P4 Windows XP box to compile for my slow linux box. Distcc for cygwin is a miracle. check out the thread at Gentoo forums

there is no installer, and that's part of the whole point of gentoo.

I started with mandrake, nice and easy, learned linux a bit at a time, and now I'm more comfortable editing config files than using a pretty (and occasionally buggy or counter-intuitive) perl/tK config tool, and I like everything just the way I want it, so gentoo's for me.

It's not for everyone and not trying to be.

I'm not even going to pretend I've read all of the many responses already made to this, but I will put in my two cents...

Build once from source, and package for like machines to cut-down on the time costs of replicating work. You just can't beat the optimization benefits of compiling from source using proper build flags (e.g. Gentoo Linux), but you also cannot rationalize the time cost of repetitive actions on identical (or near identical) hardware.

Of course, there are always those packages where build optimizations are of minimal benefit. Best bet: know your apps, know your hardware, and manage your time effectively to maximize the usefulness of both.

...unless you're referring to the limitted selection on the gentoo cd's, then no, you can't use binary packages unless you've pre-built them yourself.

1) if your mirror doesn't have binaries, add one that does to PORTAGE_BINHOST (check with #gentoo or gentoo forums for urls)

2) emerge -k foo that'll emerge the binary package of foo.

more info from Gentoo's FAQ http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml ?part=2&chap=2#doc_chap3 :

2.c. Maintaining Software

Building or Prebuilt?

Gentoo provides ebuilds, the Gentoo packages if you like. But when you want to install such an ebuild, you can choose between building the package and using a prebuilt package. But what are the advantages/disadvantages of both approaches, and can they be used next to each other?

As you probably have guessed, building packages takes a lot of time (especially if you have little resources or want to build big packages, such as KDE, OpenOffice.org, etc.). By building the package, you can use the USE setting to tweak the package to your system. Of course, you can also define high optimization options (in the CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS variables) to compile the package with.

Using prebuilt packages improves the installation time (as no more compilation is needed), but you will lose the advantages of the USE setting and the CFLAGS & CXXFLAGS variables.

As previously stated, prebuilt packages are stored in the /usr/portage/packages/All directory, while the source code of the packages is placed in /usr/portage/distfiles. If you have finished installing a package you can remove the package or source code from the respective directory. However, you might want to keep the package/source code of the latest version, just in case you want to reinstall the package (so you don't have to redownload it). ...

Installing Prebuilt Packages

When you want to install a prebuilt package, you should use the --usepkg option (-k in short). This will use the binary package available in /usr/portage/packages/All if the package and the version of the application you want to install match.

Code Listing 18: Installing a prebuilt package for gnumeric

# emerge --usepkg gnumeric

If you want to use the binary package, even if the versions don't match, use --usepkgonly (-K in short).

Code Listing 19: Installing the prebuilt package for gnumeric

# emerge --usepkgonly gnumeric

If you don't have the prebuilt package on your system yet, you can have emerge download it from a mirror, defined in the PORTAGE_BINHOST variable declared in /etc/make.conf.

To download the binary package in case this package doesn't exist on your system already, use --getbinpkg (-g in short):

Code Listing 20: Downloading and installing a prebuilt package for gnumeric

# emerge --getbinpkg gnumeric

This will download the package and the package-related information for you and install it on your system, together with the dependencies.

CB

You can have the best of both worlds with Gentoo. I began using it about a year ago, and I am sold.

Building from source using Portage is almost as easy as installing a Red Hat package. The community is extremely proactive. (I have only had problems installing or updating a couple of times in the last year, and the problems were remedied within a day or two and the portage trees updated after I submitted a bug report.) And you don't give up variety. The number of ebuilds available in the Portage tree is simply astounding.

I am even using it on my laptop these days and am extremely pleased that it seems to work well as both a server and desktop distribution.

Hope this helps :-)

Actually, building gentoo packages is VERY easy, it's the thing I like most about it. Most often than not when I need a new package (for instance, pam_pgsql) I just get a similar one (pam_mysql) and change a few things where it is needed. Either that or check bugs.gentoo.org to see if someone already did the hard work. This is a really great reference.

Actually, building gentoo packages is VERY easy, it's the thing I like most about it. Most often than not when I need a new package (for instance, pam_pgsql) I just get a similar one (pam_mysql) and change a few things where it is needed. Either that or check bugs.gentoo.org to see if someone already did the hard work. This is a really great reference.

Gentoo is a great OS as instead of having binary packaged systems, it builds everything from source but can build it effeciently and automatically. In addition it can allow you to just use it to manage the source and you compile it yourself. If you were dealing with many systems you could setup your own gentoo sync server and distribute custom copies of various packages exactly to your specs and compiling details. In addition it can easily determine dependencies, and even install them for you if needed. Gentoo is kind of like a bare bones OS that simply makes it easy to install whatever you want and rather helps shortcut the process of dealing with installing things by compiling things for you.

I agree, but it generally depends on who you are.

If you just want to use your computer, go for an 'easy' distro like Red Hat Fedora or Mandrake.

If you're a computer enthusiast who wants to get into Linux (not 'try', but you want to use it), installing from the ground up is a good idea. You get a solid foundation on what parts do what, who makes them and what your choices are. You're more likely to become a Linux guru sooner than if you go with an 'easy' distro which tempts you to stay in your comfy environment and not get your hands on stuff. ;)

The truth here is important though: it isn't always "easy". My first ground-up install (Gentoo Linux) took about a week or week and a half of nightly tinkering (an hour or so every night or every other night) and time on the weekends. This was mainly due to hardware issues. I had also been using Red Hat 7.3 up until that time.
Then again, I know people who have installed Gentoo in a weekend coming straight from Windows/Mac with only a few loose ends.

The BEST way, I think, to figure out if a custom build is for you is to read a guide on how to do it. Gentoo's is here. Skim it, it'll give you an easy idea of what you're looking at.

If anyone is interested in any other info I'd be more than happy to help, my scrambled email is in my profile. :)

Cheers

When I first used gentoo linux, I was most impressed by the quality of the documentation provided.

And then I realized. It wasn't necessarily high qualty nor at the time did it contain better content than the guides for Debian and Red Hat. It was presented in a much cleaner format using CSS and a nice clean layout. Since then, the quality of the gentoo documentation has only improved.

Compare this gentoo page with this TLDP page.

See the difference? They both contain useful information. The TLDP documentation makes me feel like i'm reading a legal document. Blegh! The gentoo document is much less harsh on the user.

This is scary, considering that gentoo is widely considered one of the most difficult of the linuxes to use, as it contains absolutely no installer. Thanks to the clear documentation, I actually perfer the gentoo installation process over fedora's, as it's easy (thanks to the documentation), and gives me a tremendous amount of control. I think this fact can only be capitalized by the fact that I use a mac 95% of the time as my desktop machine.

Please... add some color. It helps. Lots of people are visual learners. It just so happens that most linux users aren't (Reading a monotonous 26-page manpage on ls of all things makes me want to gouge my eyes out)

You can see in gentoo's website that they have a very nice consistency in their documentation, it really helps the human eye find what's needed among all data, so Im all for it

you go ldp!

you can. see here.

Gentoo can do security "out of the box." Check out the Hardened Gentoo project. They provide install isos and stage tarballs so you can start with SELinux, stack-protection, and a couple of other nice security goodies.

Surely there's a way you can express your displeasure with MS products to your friends with a little more tact?

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