Gentoo Questions

[Brett I. Holcomb]

Thank you for the offer - I'll probably take you up on it!  I will probably 
give it a try.  I believe that Gentoos approach would fit the way I work.  
I normally install Linux and then only upgrade when I have to - I do try 
and keep up with a stable kernel but I don't do everyone.  As for apps the 
ones I use a lot I'll keep updated and if I need a new one I'll go get it.

  I do have Caldera WS 3.1 installed on one system but I'm migrating away 
from it.  I installed RH 7.3 on a new system I have but I left partitions 
for three other installs.  So with RH 7.3, I don't plan to upgrade to 8.0 - 
I was just going to do my own upgrades as necessary.  Sounds like Gentoo 
lets me setup a system and then upgrade as I desire.

I have a dual Athlon 1.9 system that I have the RH 7.3 on and would put 
Gentoo on that one.  As for KDE and Gnome - I got tired of KDE's bloat with 
2.2.1 and mainly their "yes we know it's broken but that will be fixed in 
the next release X (where x from 1- ???) months away.  Till then use our 
betas - yeah! right!  put a beta on my production system!!  I've been using 
Gnome on RH 7.3 but haven't gotten used to it and don't know where things 
are on it.  I have two annoyances with Gnome (at least that's all I've 
found so far) - 1).  When you log in as root you get a message warning you 
and you have to click okay.  You can not disable the message  I know that 
being root can be dangerous but there are some things I do with a GUI 
because it's convienent and I want to use it as root and don't need someone 
telling me every time about it - do it once, let me disable it 2) they have 
a "Start Here" with various system functions that pops up every time I 
login and I haven't found out how to get rid of it.  Both things remind me 
of MS products - we know better than you!  I did ask about the warning 
message on a Gnome RH mailing list and after being told you couldn't 
disable it I got flamed for using root by one of the contributors to Gnome! 
 Give me a break people! 

I was looking at doing xfce just before I moved and may get back to it 
again.



snips
> 
> If I can help you in any way, let me know.  I've just reenabled my
> gentoo system after a couple of months toying around with RH 7.3 (it's
> also a quite reliable distro) and getting tired of the hunt and peck
> approach to finding new packages!
> 
> People on this list (well some anyway) got tired of hearing about the
> advantages of gentoo, so I don't report anything very often.
> 
> As an example of package availability, the ink isn't even dry on
> mozilla 1.2.1, but gentoo already has a standard ebuild which I just
> completed installing.
> 
> You'll either love gentoo and wonder why anyone except a raw newbie
> uses anything else, or you'll hate it.  Using the latest  gentoo
> livecd (1.4+) and one of the pre-packed tarballs, you can get up and
> running with a completely usable system in less than 2 days (lots of
> compiles).  Add an extra day for kde and/or gnome, if you are of that
> persuasion (I use xfce).  Note that you can do most all of this from
> your currently running system (chroot to the partition where gentoo is
> being built) so that you can be having fun while the compiles churn
> away in the background.
> 
> Just a note if you try it - watch your USE variables.  Gentoo will by
> default drag in kde and/or gnome as a dependancy for any package that
> has (or seems to have) optional features that require kde and/or
> gnome.  What looks like a simple package install (xfce for example)
> could easily expand to 24 hours!  Be sure to do 'emerge -p
> packagename' to have portage tell you the dependancies in advance.

-- 
Brett I. Holcomb
brettholcomb at R777charter.net
AKA Grunt <><
Registered Linux User #188143
Remove R777 to email