Ubuntu CD's for Free

[A. Khattri]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Michael Hipp wrote:

> 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.

I understand - it is the path of least resistance for many people ;-) But
its a fact that the rate of Gentoo adoption has seen a double digit
precentage rise over the past year alone.

> 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.

Very few Linux distros have been based around source-level packages so
this is a new thing in the Linux world. But it hasn't hurt the FreeBSD
guys a bit. I knew I was flogging a dead horse with RH when I ended up
building stuff from source because some package didn't have a feature that
I wanted enabled in it. This is fine for one server but when it becomes
several the maintenance becomes overwhelming.

> 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.

With experience, a stage 3 (binary) Gentoo install can be done in as
little as 20 mins. Once you have the base system running you can customize
or rebuild anything or everything if you wish - you dont lose anything by
starting with a binary install.

> 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.

My maintenance updates are mostly automated so I dont waste time building
binaries since they're already built during the night. So updates dont
take any longer than for any other binary distro.


-- 
Aj.