Ubuntu CD's for Free

[Michael Hipp]

A. Khattri wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Michael Hipp wrote:
> 
> 
>>I have. There is much I like and respect about Gentoo. But until someone cares
>>enough about it to give it a real installer I won't be able to consider it for
>>any kind of serious work.
> 
> 
> Ha - that's funny because I use it for all my servers for "serious" work.
> 
> Most people go through eye candy installers in RH/Suse then graduate to
> Debian or something similar and then discover Gentoo and realize how
> fantastic the package system is compared to the others especially when it
> comes to maintenance. RH is a PITA to maintain and now that its no longer
> free (yes, Im ignoring Fedora) people are looking elsewhere. My experience
> has taught me that most RPM-based package systems are evil. Gentoo OTOH is
> very easy to customize and very easy to maintain.

I fear most Debian users might take offense at the idea that they just haven't 
matured enough yet to graduate to Gentoo. And it does not appear that 
RH/Fedora is a dying distro as you imply.

RPM works great as long as you're willing to be limited to only packages that 
come from the distro vendor. Red Hat has apparently been successful in spite 
of RPM, and not because of it.

> As far as the installation goes, the steps are pretty easy and you do
> learn a lot so if anything breaks you don't end up unable to fix it
> because you can't run redhat-network-config or some other silly GUI tool
> (and I dont want or have GUI tools anywhere near my servers).

I know all the rationalizations for making the installation as difficult, 
time-consuming and labor intensive as possible. There is a new thread in the 
Gentoo forums about it seemingly daily. But once you've gone thru it a couple 
of times the benefits wear off quickly. After that you just want to get a 
system up and running as efficiently as possible. Gentoo is a disaster if that 
is your aim.

Gentoo is one of the best, most innovative distros to come along in a long 
time. I like Gentoo. I would like to standardize on Gentoo. But I can't 
because time is money and my kids like to eat.

Michael