Good choice. Especially to get your feet wet with. Enjoy.

@osor

Here is the bug report. It has a link to the patch in one of the posts and a pretty lengthy discussion of the problem.

Lol, this reminds me of a post I did a long time ago, when I was fairly new to linux and looking for a good distro. Somebody then told me Slackware was the best way to go. I got it running alright in about 2 days, just so I could download and burn Mandrake.

I haven't been following this thread, but from reading the initial post, all I can say is that when I tried Gentoo recently, I couldn't even get it to install! I downloaded the minimal install CD and it logged me right into the console. OKay... then what? So I go and read the "quick" install on the Gentoo website and it requires me to do a million steps manually before installing. I immediately ejected the CD and went back to Ubuntu with its straight forward installation.

yeah... god forbid you have to read to install it...

I wonder what the literacy rate is amount Linux users?

i always found computing exciting (i am a chemist by trade), played with different hardware configurations in the past, water cooling etc but always in windows.

on day (6 months ago) i decided i am bored with playing WOW and bored with windows in general. my gf at the time (wife now) introduced me to macs. soon thereafter i decided to try linux.

i downloaded ubuntu liveCD and tried to install it. took me about 1 week of many trials...what was advertised to be easy turned out to be a nightmare for me. the installation progress was freezing midway, i was getting errors once it finally went through, etc. it finally installed but the problems didnt stop there. my computer was freezing, had problems loading programs, etc. my introduction to linux was definitely rocky and was not sure whether "this is the way linux is supposed to work" which was buggy as hell for me at the time.

i decided - let me try another distro. read through the webstes, asked questions like yours, but never did get a good answer and my lack of knowledge kept me from seeing "the forest past the trees". i decided however to try gentoo (i heard it was the meanest fastest distro out there).

boy...it took me about 1 month to get it to install. gentoo does NOT install from a liveCD properly (even though it has the option). it took me weeks of reinstalling it following the step by step method from the minimalCD. the upside however is that gentoo support from their website is phenomenal. i have solved ~90 of my opened threads.

it was frustrating to hit so many road blocks but now i am quite familiar with it, things make sense and everything runs extremely well. i am in love with gentoo and all the new things i have learned about computing because of it. whenever i have a problem i ask on the forums and it gets explained to me well. i understand it and take note of it for future use. i try to think back of my windows days and i cant believe how limited that OS is.

i hope this helps.

vivat gentoo!

I'm a college student majored in Computer Science. I developed programs in Windows for 2 years. Then approximately one year ago, one of the operating system course required me to develop device drivers for the Linux system. So, I started to use Ubuntu. It was a smooth ride However, about six months later, I felt that Ubuntu is not customizable and powerful enough, because the system takes care of may low level details and hide those details from the programmer. In order to really understand the Linux kernel and device driver programming, I began to use one of the best choices -- Gentoo. Got it running in 6 hours with USE flags targeted specifically for Gnome system (with no support for kde, qt, etc.). I have to say that Gentoo is the fastest Linux system I've ever used (other distros I used before include Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, Damn Small Linux / Not, Slackware, PCLinux, CentOS). Among all of the distros I've used, I thought Gentoo is the fastest, and Red Hat ranked at the 2nd place, and Ubuntu ranked as the third one.

I'm going to stick with Gentoo and develop more device drivers and other kinds of programs for it
I recommend Gentoo to Linux users and programmers at the intermediate or advanced level.

If your old laptop can handle a USB/Firewire external hard drive, you could install Virtualbox (or another virtual machine), install a few other distros within the virtual machine (with the images stored on the external drive), and just test them out that way. Don't expect them to be blazing fast, but you could try them out that way.

However, as was stated before, running Gentoo on older hardware can provide one with alot of reading time while waiting for something to compile (OpenOffice is/was legendary for the required build time, for an example). On the other hand, once the compiles are done it may be possible to pull a little more speed out of older hardware using Gentoo, but that is only a real consideration if binary-only distros (Arch aside) still optimize for the old i386. Whether this is still standard practice among distros like Debian or Slackware is beyond my knowledge. Gains may not be worth the compile times for potentially minor runtime improvements on a system that, for all any of us know, may be RAM and drive I/O bound.

One more thing to consider. If you know someone locally who is willing to be your mentor, use whatever distro (s)he uses. Getting personal help can get you a long way, and you can leverage on their specialized knowledge of their specific distro.

With all of the distro wars you see on this an other forums, you would think only distro "X" is any good. The reality is, most of them are very good and I can recommend any of the mainstream ones. Just because I might dislike a distro doesn't mean I don't recognize that it is perfect for someone else.

That's the beauty of Linux and Open Source Software.

jeremy just has to find a way to allow old threads to stay dead rather than being resurrected all the time ...
And yes, there has been a thread about that too.

Like, say, and autoclosing mechanism after a thread has gone, say, a month without a reply?

Unbuntu- Great distro if you are new and userfriendly
gentoo- I believe it start out as a gaming linux. But more control and experienced usered.

When it comes down to it they are still basicly the same.

You should base your decision on the age of your computer.
Older machines such as the Pentium II's and Pentium III's with low ram do better with a 2.4 series kernel.
2.6 series kernel after 2.6.22 you'll see a performance hit on the older machines
because the scheduler got trashed. Dual core machines will work better with the latest kernel releases: 2.6.31

If you have integrated Intel graphics chip, then you'll want to avoid certain kernels or distributions altogether.

I enjoy having source code to look at things. Find a distribution where it's easy to get the source code.

Slackware comes with it's book on the install media and enough documentation. A lot of software comes with it.

All the source code is on the install DVD or one of the 4 cdroms. If you install something you get the development packages too.

It's installer is prone to working flawlessly if you have a good burn of a cdrom.

For an older machine 10.2 or 12.0.

Newer machines 12.2.