Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On a 'sort of' related note.
I've been thinking about giving Gentoo a go
It is really worth the additional hassle (if there is any)
The main "hassle" is the learning curve. It really isn't for newbies. That said, my Linux knowledge soared when I started playing with it. The second one is downloading every package and compiling it. I've got cable at home, and I run a full mirror (~27GB, but a build is nowhere near that big) so my builds are done on a 100MB switched LAN. If I had a modem, I'd think twice about it, I think.
Are there really any speed improvements or are they subjective
There are real speed improvements, definitely. The downside is that it can take a long time to compile everything, especially is one uses X & KDE. Our server build is fully automated, we boot from the CD, answer about 10 questions, and walk away. On an Athlon 1800XP with 256MB and an ATA133 HDD (our standard server) it takes almost exactly 3 hours to build a system with mysql, apache, php, postfix, etc., etc. including an optimised kernel. Obviously, we don't use X. On an older box, say a PII 200, ATA33 HDD, and with X & KDE, you might be looking at 24 hours! *Everything* is built from scratch! That said, with 1.4, there are ready-built packages for every architecture, and build time is considerably reduced with little compromise in final system speed.
How recent is everything, and can anyone explain the package management system (or whatever the equivalent is) briefly.
Everything is as recent as you want it to be. There is some pain in being bleeding edge, because sometimes people make mistakes in the packages and things can break. That said, unless you lose portage (Adam!) it's easy to rip packages out and put them back. The support fora are very good too (they run on phpBB2).
It's all driven by a thing called the portage tree, which contains references to the specific versions of the 2531 (and growing daily) packages available. If you update the tree (emerge rsync), then you will, if you want, build the latest version of everything (emerge --update world). We keep our own tree, so we can manage the changes properly. Frankly, the best place to go for Gentoo info is the site itself. The docs are very good: http://www.gentoo.org
Cheers, Laurie.