On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 09:43, Laurie Brown wrote:
Richard Lewis wrote:
OK, I've had a look at the Gentoo website and it looks quite cool. I'll have a go at installing (if the UEA network decides to behave itself! Grr!)
Just a couple of questions:
- People say it takes a long time to install. If I've got a PIII, 512MB RAM,
20GB HDD, etc and I want a fairly standard system (KDE, basic development tools, a few music progams) how long does anyone think it might take?
It will take a very long time on a machine like that. I recommend that for the first couple of times you install it (it's a pretty steep learning curve, even if you know Linux quite well) you use the pre-compiled binaries for your platform. You can always replace them later.
I'll second that one. Even on my new shiny P4 I opted for the Gentoo install discs that they produce to give you a set of pre-compiled binaries for a particular architecture so you can start with a working base system and nothing more, a working base system plus X etc... Once I had a system up and running, I then went off and brought my system up to date.
I'll be happy to loan out the CD's if anyone wants to use them (Pentium 4 only though I'm afraid).
If you're interested, go to http://store.gentoo.org/ You can purchase a copy for your particular architectire for about £5 and it'll be sourced through a UK distributor.
- Its source based, which seems like a really good idea. But can you use
portage to install any old source.tar.gz? Or do they have to be recognised ones? (in the portage 'tree', is it, or something?) And if you can't is there a way that you can make them installable with portage?
There are many thousands of packages available (ebuilds: "emerge -s <package>" will tell you if there is one), but of course, if you need a tool for which there's no ebuild, you can install it in the usual manner (outside of portage). Ebuilds aren't that hard to write, and it's a good way to contribute something back to the community.
It's less true than it was, but be aware it moves at quite a pace. I have many production machines, and it takes a while to keep them all current.
http://forums.gentoo.org is your friend at all times...
As is http://packages.gentoo.org :-)
- Does it have an equivalent to Debian's 'non-free' or MDK's PLF? (For things
like libdvdcss, pardon my French ;-)
I don't know what either of those are, sorry.
Cheers, Laurie.
Nick