At present I am running debian etch. However i have been looking at gentoo and now with itsgtk installer and stage 3 binaries it seems to be within my ability. However would you say its worth trying as a newbie. I only have 7 months linux experiance so far. Post install is there alot of tweaking required to make it usable? I dont have any fancy hardware nearly everything is on board except my graphics card, all other distros have detected and used the hardware fine.

How about portage, I only have a 2.6 celeron with 256 ram (soon to be adding another 512), would i have seriously long compile times with this processor for everyday apps like firefox and openoffice, i wouldnt be doing any majoy upgrades liek kde/gnome or xorg.

If gentoo is still rather taxing how about kororaa? Is this stillfully compatable with the gentoo portage servers? Would kororaa make the using of a gentoo based system easier?

Thanks in advance

Michael

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

Basically - gentoo is reputed to be the best. Mostly due to it's community support - most of us have adapted gentoo howtos. It also involves one of the better educations in basic GNU/Linux systems outside of LFS.

However - you should consider your needs and the uses you want to put linux to. In Debian you have one of the most solid and configurable nixes out there - the basis for so many other successful distros.

I see "Mandrivia" in your profile, so you've been around a bit more than the average newbie-of-7-months. You'll be getting a fair idea of what you do and don't want in a distro. The above link may help you sort out your ideas.

See if you can compile a kernel (apply kernel patches even) and install stuff from source... try mplayer or nethack: vulture's eye. This would count as a major benchmark to linux guruhood. Not that gentoo requires it, it just helps a great deal.

Remember, though, a distro you are comfortable with is most important. All linuxes are very configurable and in the end all distros will end up fitting you very closely. In the end: every linux is as unique as the user.

yeh i have tried a few of the newbie aimed distros, ubuntu, debian, mepis although its still debian, mandriva and suse10 and vector.

The only thign it would be used for is for a standard desktop machien, photo editing, a little bit of gaming, word processing the usuall home desktop pc uses.

The cloest thing I have doen to compiling a kernel or anythign wa sinstalling the nvidia drivers with the nvidia isntaller using the kernel-sources. so i havernt done anything advanced. The only thing i have compiled was lame and then used checkinstall to make it into a .deb file.

I was considering gentoo though just because of the rate at which new apps are released for it. But i also wanted to try it out of experiance because although debian meets my needs perfectly, how do i know that gentoo or fedora isnt better for my needs without trying. I just didnt want to go through the trouble of installing gentoo to find out to administrate it and configure it i have to have had a two years worth of linux use.

Yeh i have read some of the gentoo documentation from the website and its excelent, iv had a peek inside the irc rooms as well just to obserb the general atmosphere, seems pleasent unlike my expericances with the official debian rooms.

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edit i know debian its self is not aimed at newbies in particular, although its pretty damn easy to use anyway.

I do not recommend using GUI installer. It may work. But there are too many complaints like: it installs and leaves you with half-broken system; it completely ruins partition table causing loss of all data in HDD. It is expected to be much better with 2006.1 release. Until then I'd recommend using manual stage 3 install. Or at least back up everything you care about before starting install.

Gentoo is a very good distro, but I don't think its ideal for newbies or people who are not quite up to scratch with their Linux skills (I am not specifically referring to you here, I am just generalising). The problem most people will face is that there is so much choice and configuration options left up to you the user and there are no nifty gui frontends to many important Gentoo tools. This means that you need more than basic Linux knowledge to make the right choices and get things working right. You have to be prepared to do a lot of stuff from the CLI and patience is a virtue because some packages can take ages to compile.

Some skills you may wish to polish up on before trying Gentoo are compiling your own kernel from scratch, get comfortable using the CLI for editing files and other sysadmin task. I found books like rute and bash beginners guide to be really helpful in polishing up my Linux skills. I installed Gentoo recently and I learnt a lot of stuff during and after the installation. I would urge you to give it is a shot if you have the time and motivation.

You are correct. I tried using the GUI installer and it had problems recognising non Linux partitions. When I installed on a completely new system, there was always a step that didn't go right. Anyway I ended up using the minimal install disc and everything went smoothly.

By the way how often are the Gentoo point releases ie. 2006.1, 2006.2 etc.

> By the way how often are the Gentoo point releases ie. 2006.1, 2006.2 etc.

I do not think they have a schedule for this. And it really does not affect stage 3 netinstalls as long as the latest profile is used. You are getting the latest Gentoo anyway, even Gentoo install disk is not needed. Knoppix or other LiveCD will do.

i will take your advice, il give compiling my own kernel ago some time and start learnign some bash stuff, then hopefully give it a go when i finnish uni in the summer.

Thanks for the help

Michael

I was just curious because I am thinking of migrating my main desktop to Gentoo but I want to wait until KDE 3.5.1 is stable and unmasked.

I don't see the idea of using Gentoo as stage 3 where's the fun in that ? so it's at least stage 2 and that takes time took me a day I think (with kde).

Not a problem if you have lots of time to spare. I am sure many people don't and thats why stage 3 is now the default installation method. Personally I would like to do a stage 1 installation when I have time just as a personal challenge.

i think gentoo are releasing 2 a year now so 2006.1 should be around august/september. And for the interest of compile times it takes me 14 minutes to compile firefox just timed it . On a different note how would another gig of RAM effect my compile times?, would i see a big speed gain?

You're right but why would I go on using Gentoo not for making it customized as I can ? I would like to try stage 1 too one day but that will take at least few months before I'll have the time for that, I do think that if you go on stage 3 you can by that go on any other distro if you want Gentoo to be for 686 so just use Arch why even take the time to even install stage 3.

You get exactly same customization with stage 3. That's not the point. Installing Gentoo is fun, but it is nothing compared to using and fine tuning it. Most people seem to think installing Gentoo is a challenge. It is not. Maintaining Gentoo and tuning it to perfection is a challenge. An ever-lasting challenge.

I heard someone says long time ago that the time you'll give every day of fixing and maintaining Gentoo doesn't worth installing it the first place.