[oclug]Gentoo

[Johnathan Hicks]

Bruce Harding wrote:
> At 04:12 PM 11/7/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> 
>> On Thursday 07 November 2002 16:07, Shad Young wrote:
>> > Does it actually do a complete ports style install? (I.E. Go, grab 
>> the src
>> > and compile the system on the fly?) I only did a complete ports install
>> > with BSD once... the install for a very basic system took 7 hours, 
>> but when
>> > it was done, my god was it stable and fast. Same with Gentoo?
>> >
>> > This is looking like my kind of Distro.
>>
>> Yup thats about it except from my reading of the page you start with a 
>> minimum
>> install, compile it and then work upwards. Its definitely an 
>> overnighter even
>> on moderm fast hardware...
>>
>> Best of luck. Let me know how you get on as its somthing I was pondering
>> myself.
> 
> 
> Yup, this is true.  I'm running Gentoo on a AMD 1.33/266 and it took 6/8 
> hours to go from empty HDD to a running functional KDE desktop.  I 
> really like the flexibility that this distro provides.  It gets me as 
> close to debian without all the debian install difficulties.   I'm very 
> happy with Gentoo.

Lunar (www.lunar-linux.org) works in a similar way, optimized the way you want 
it from the bottom up. It branched from Sorcerer a while back. It has a nice 
menu driven UI for install configuration and package management. Something 
that is NOT good about the install is that if you choose to use grub as 
bootloader, it dumps you into a text editor with a blank configuration file. 
Not fun if you have no idea how to use grub.

A general caveat about a source based distro is that if you happen to break 
the compiler and have no binary tarball, then one might as well do a backup 
and reinstall.

--John