It is great that you pick Gentoo, but depending on your system it may take a few days to complete compiling programs.

If you can wait until tomorrow I should have the first draft done on how to install Gentoo. It contains some steps that the Gentoo developers left out in their install documentation.

I used Gentoo for a little bit..
Struggled with it for about a day to install it (had the.. I don't need the manual attitude for awhile)

When I finally got it working it was the greatest feeling in the world!

I really learned a lot, and you will too!

So far all I did was download the iso file. Let me know about the documentation.

Maybe you're not expressing yourself well, then? Or have simply
got the wrong things to say? ;}

I've been using Slack pretty much exclusively for the last 6 years,
and have no idea what you mean.


Cheers,
Tink

And these two are definitely a contradiction in terms. You
can't be bleating, errrh, bleeding edge while being focused
on stable.


Cheers,
Tink

Gave up on Gentoo. Too hard to install. I don't have time to play around with it.
What are the benefits of Gentoo compared to other versions of linux?

I choose CentOs for my first linux version. We use CentOs at work for our servers. Does anyone here use CentOs?

What can I say? Centos = RedHat AS without commercial support.
I wouldn't use either ;} at home; at work we have a couple of
DeadRat installations, and one Centos machine (just to have a
play pen).

I'm not going to make any recommendations ... but RPM is of
the devil :}


Cheers,
Tink

Suse 10 Pro is the way to go. I started learning with RedHat before Fedora and have used several others (DSL, KNOPPIX, Fedora, Ubuntu and at one point attempted to install debian).I finally switched to Suse and wish I started here.

Easy to install. Easy to use. As involved and flexible as you want it to be.

..................sorry wrong thread...............

Actually Gentoo is easy to install if you follow my howto that I gave you, it should get you going although I have not yet finished it. The hard part is following the directions which a lot of people have a hard time following.

I do not recommend SUSE because it is not Linux. For an example, you have to use a patched nVidia software. SUSE is not as easy as it may seem.

Gentoo's benefits are easy updates and you can leave out the junk that several distributions include. Gentoo gives you the control what you want and what you do not want. Every program is compile to your specifications. Gentoo provides names for runlevels instead of rc.5 which is a confusing name. It could be GUI or it could be reboot. Both an expert and novice Linux user have to guess.

Below is a portion of my /etc/inittab file that is running Gentoo. Can you tell what runlevel the kernel will go into upon boot up and what kind setup it will be.

id:5:initdefault:

l0:0:wait:/sbin/rc shutdown
l1:S1:wait:/sbin/rc single
l2:2:wait:/sbin/rc nonetwork
l3:3:wait:/sbin/rc default
l4:4:wait:/sbin/rc default
l5:5:wait:/sbin/rc gui
l6:6:wait:/sbin/rc reboot


Both Redhat like distributions and Debian distribution look the same.

Most distros use an Inittab... Arch is also just as good as gentoo, but you don't have to compile everything.

They both follow the same philosophy/

As I started with Linux, I first tried the knoppix live CD, and then tried Mandrake. It was far to big and I didn't like it at all. After that I tried Gentoo and it was quite useful to me, that it was tricky to install for a newbie, but it didn't really work for me that good, and now I use Debian (testing) and I really like it. The "apt" package system works the same as Gentoo's "portage", but you don't have to compile everything on your machine, because it downloads the binarys. And I didn't really notice any performance gain as I used Gentoo, especially for a Noob, who doesn't know what USE flags to use!

Check out the Distr Watch here at Linux Question and you will find a lot of reviews of different Distros.

But if it is first time you want to install linux, then I would go for Feodora (a lot of users = easy to get help) but my personal favorite are SuSE and it also usually quite easy to get quick help to solve problems with configurations and so on, they have quite good admin tool called Yast. The problem with SuSE is that a lot of stuff don't work direct after install and you have to reconfigure by hand.

Cheers

Dussel

I love Linux (especially Debian and Gentoo), but if you are kind of a UNIX guy, you could also give a try at Solaris 10, which you can get for free in the sun website, or to FreeBSD.

As for Gentoo, I agree it is a good distro, but I do not think it is the best for starting. In the beginning you want to experiment as much as you can, and having to compile everything is not the best way of doing so.

Binary distributed distros like Debian (of Mandrake-SuSE in the RPM world) will allow you to experiment and test whatever you feel like without having to wait so long.

Once you get used to Linux, you could move to Gentoo if you want to...

My two cents!