Hi guys,
I've been an ardent fan of redhat until now. Before you go "here cometh another convert to the debian church", let me tell you its Gentoo magic I'm talking about.
There's something quite magically simple with gentoo thats unbeatable by other distros.
First, source compiled from scratch. all u need to do is , well, nothing.
agreed u need a 24/7 access to net to get it installed but let me tell you its worth the effort.
I haven't faced a single compiling prob. or installation either. To give you a taste of whats running on my nifty P4 1.5ghz - 2.6.5 kernel with patches. alsa works without me doing anything. - gnome 2.6 for desktop. (emerge gnome-2.6, thats it!) - xorg-x11, (do i have the bragging rights for this one in the grp ? or is fedora already there ?) - the latest and the greatest of any software u can name of - kde, abiword, oo, xmms, mplayer, gaim, ayttm all the standard fare. Name any software and i'll only tease u by installing it in the next half an hour or so. And best of all ! compiled for my machine only ! with flags of my own spec.
Now before we start whining how it isn't possible for everyone to install a source based distro, there's precompiled packages avlbl. from gentoo on a single iso that removes the pain of downloading most of them. the rest which you would want can be downloaded onto a cd, dumped into distfiles and presto it picks em and works its magic.
Best of all - if u ain't happy with the options compiled into ur prog. change em and it won't crib !
Mandrake was close to beating them, but they lost it when they couldn't get rid of the dependency hell, and I don't blame them.
And their forums are a part of the internet legend now. Post ur query and the guys ans in the next few mins.
Gentoo is yet to make a decent hw detection tool tho. and a nice installer wouldn't hurt.
If you've used linux for any decent period of time, its time u give this simply flexible distro a whirl on ur spare hdd. To give u an analogy gentoo is like wine - gets better with time.
from the trenches, C
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