Need help with Gentoo

frontier1 · 03-09-2003, 10:29 AM

Hi all, I am currently running Redhat 8.0 and am happy with it, especially the fonts, they are beautiful, best I've ever seen, better than Winblows bye the way. But I am very curious about Gentoo, are the fonts good, because I don't think I could go back to ugly fonts. Also I use the apt-get system Synaptic for upgrading software, I know Gentoo is Debian based, so they should be even better at that, are the repositories for Gentoo more up to date than Redhat's? What is the easiest way to get gentoo, I only have a dial up connection, and am still ignorant about creating iso images and whatnot. Thanks, also I want to eventually create a wireless network with my other computer, using a router and a wireless card, does gentoo have good hardware support??

acid_kewpie · 03-09-2003, 10:51 AM

how good the fonts are is nothing at all to do with the arbitrary distribution, there are an awful lot of ways that the fonts are created on a system, some are pretty some are not, and i can assure you that redhat uses lots of different ways for different purposes. Gentoo is always very very up to date and so will enable you to install the latest x font server etc... but if that really is all that matters to you about a distribution.. why bother changing??

frontier1 · 03-09-2003, 11:44 AM

"Why bother changing?"

I don't know! I think there is something psycologically wrong woth me, it seems as if everytime I get a system spec'd out the way I want, I want something different......................arghhhhhhhhhh

busbarn · 03-09-2003, 11:47 AM

I just installed gentoo and it looks great. Fonts are wonderful. Package management i think is easier than debian. Maybe I just understand portage better. All you have to do to install a package is

emerge sync
emerge (package name)

My default install of gentoo looks better on my machine than rh8, mdk9, and debian. It's about the same as slackware.

CAUTION: installing takes a long time if you use a stage1 tarball. I did and it took about 10 hours just for the base system (P4 1.4ghz) and another 18 hours for kde. It's been working for about an hour and a half on evolution. Once installed everything is great but is takes a really really long time.