Gentoo Linux Reloaded

nitro322 writes "Daniel Robbins, the leading developer for Gentoo Linux, has written an excellent O'Reilly Network article covering many of the various features of Gentoo, what's coming in version 1.4 (due out SOON), and why you should give it a try. If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?"

Comments

Gentoo

[bogie]

I find it interesting how many people like having to compile everything and use a distro with such a archaic(not bad, just outdated compared to todays distros) install routine.

What's even more interesting is how many people have left Debian for Gentoo. Debian users are some of the most loyal I know, and yet many of them have simply moved on. I'm guessing Debian blew it with the long delay's between releases.

I also have to say after using linux for a while now, I just have no desire or need to get down and dirty with my distro, am I surprised as many people still are. Keep in mind I'm talking about desktop use where I just want to get my work done, not server use, where I do end up compiling some of my apps.

Personally I just don't have any interest in Gentoo or that style of distro, but obviously not everyone feels that way, since it does seem to be one of the up and coming distros.

Stupid question

[scott1853]

Why should I use Gentoo? Really. Is there some huge feature comparison matrix for all the different distros? Is there really any major innovation between distros?

I don't run *nix that much. I have a dual boot at home for Mandrake 8.2 and W2K. Do different distros really only matter to the elite linux hackers?

Re:What am I waiting for?

[Zapman]

One of the things I do is leave a 2 gig or so partition around to 'fart around with'. That's enough space to do a full install of most distributions. This also lets me:

1) leveradge my existing linux swap partition
2) mount my home directory (though it might be in /mount/hda/home/zapman, I don't really care)
3) Learn a lot about other distributions without much cost. (2 gigs... come on.)

And with gentoo, you don't even have that cost... they have 'live cd's. Boot of the cd, and you have a working gentoo distribution in RAM. Great to play with. Great to play Unreal Tourny 2003 on linux! (that's the main point of the disk)

Re:All these weird names

[Monkelectric]

Hey, I named Gentoo, (seriously). I got invovled with the project when it was called Enoch because I was having some trouble compiling GTK because we'd stumbled onto some weird gcc bug (IIRC). I ended up working on some compiler tools and writing packages ...

Anyways, one day drobbins decided to change the name to something less secular, and so we sat around thinking up names ... We started thinking along the lines, what did we want to say about our linux? ... we bandied around lots of names, eventually I found some zoo site that said the Gentoo Penguin was the fastest pengiun there was ... and the name stuck