Jamie French wrote:
Hi Laurie,
What merits did and does Gentoo offer over other distro's for your business and personal use? Just interested to learn more :)
I used to be a SuSE user, was reasonably happy with it, and au fait with its foibles. Then they went all GUI on me, and it became less and less a server platform, and more and more a desktop one. The same appears to be true of all distros, who seem to think that the Linux market is limited to the desktop. We run few desktops of any description, but lots of Linux servers...
Then it started to be a pain to keep up-to-date with security stuff, RPM kept getting in the way of anything decent, and then the new releases came so fast our boxes were left behind. Then they started dropping support for "old" versions which were running happily on servers I didn't feel comfortable with upgrading, and didn't see the need to. What finally did me was when I applied a security patch to an application on a firewall with limited space. It decided it needed sendmail (I was running ssmtp on it), and automatically put it on the box, causing me loads of trouble.
We talked about Linux From Scratch, and went down the road a way, and then found Gentoo, LFS made easy (well, easier anyway).
Now we have an optimised kernel (and apps) for our architecture, not a 386 one. We have an automated build process so we can build identical servers easily and quickly from source for which *we* run the change control. We don't have hundreds of superfluous packages we don't need and often don't want, we get exactly what we say we want there. I think the bottom line really, is the control. It's easy to manage a system once you get your head around how it works. Adding new apps, removing old ones, and general package management is a piece of cake. We also have a vibrant and knowledgeable support community far better than SuSE's ever was.
If I have a complaint, it's that sometimes things break temporarily, which is why we change control stuff. Gentoo publish snapshots of the portage tree nightly, which we archive, and we make our own tree for our build, so we can control wersions easily. The fact that it's so easily automated means we can manage remote servers easily in terms of versions and build, and create new ones to an exact, known, controlled platform.
Cheers, Laurie.