Hello!

I am thinking about to set up a server with the following components above. For the moment I am using a Mandrake server, but I am thinking about to change to Gentoo. I wonder if there is anyone how uses Gentoo and would recommend it... I've hard its a much harder to set up a Gentoo system than many other "user frinedly" bin-dists... I dont care about that, but when the server is running it shoud run... forever. I like Mandrakes URPMI tool and I wonder if Gentoos emerge woks as good as URPMI... Anyone who has any server experience with Gentoo??? Bad / Good???

MVH Jonas W

I have changed from Mandrake to Gentoo and with the exception of the ftp server I run all those servers on my machine.

I have found it easier in some ways, harder then others. I used to have dependency nightmares in Mandrake, maybe it was just me but I just couldn't be bothered installing dozens of RPM's just to get the one app I wanted.

Also programs that required multiple RPM's used to drive me nuts as well. I used to find it almost impossible to install the bigger packages and so I usually complied them myself anyway..

So with Gentoo all that hassle just went away. Everything was compiled from source with the comple time options I wanted. Dependency problems went away. The only problem I had was lack of knowledge on my part, you get used to RPM's sort of working out of the box with preconfigured conf files etc. whereas know I have to set all that up, but I see that as a good thing becasue I end up setting it up properly.

The way I see it I know have all the advantages of the Debian style package manager, no depedency problems, but I get the latest of everything, no waiting till someone builds the deb files or RPM's or whatever.

It is more work but well worth the effort IMO.

it's really not that much harder at all, less front ends but then they're normally spawn of the devil anyway, and you shoudl be actively wanting to edit the actual config files yourself anyway. certainly installing software on gentoo is undeniably far far easier than mandrake, even with mandrakes urpmi. it really can't touch portage with any kind of stick at all....