Edenyard wrote:

I've just read something on Daniel James' 'Linux User Bulletin' that's got me thinking. There was mention of Gentoo Linux and it said that Gentoo was 'self-building'. Does that mean that, when one installs Gentoo, all the packages get automatically compiled for the processor that's actually in the machine, rather than defaulting to a 386 or something? Does that also mean that it takes an absolute age to install? And is it really much of an improvement over, say, my favourite Slackware?

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but to a Bear of Very Little Brain (TM), it's perplexing and interesting all at the same time - maybe a bit like a jar of honey whose lid won't come off.... (Oh dear - guess what I've been reading lately?)

Any enlightenment, please, anyone?

I've been using Gentoo Linux now for well over a year, and run many commercial servers on it. I have servers in customers' offices too, supported and managed remotely. Gentoo is, IMO, top stuff. It does require a bit of a learning curve, it's fair to say, and it isn't for the newbie. That said, using it has advanced my knowledge of Linux, which I thought was pretty good anyway, in leaps and bounds...

It can either be built *entirely* from source, optimised for your particular CPU (one can tweak this a lot), and/or at package level. For instance for a machine without X, one can tell it to ignore all dependencies involving X, and they aren't compiled in. Or, one can use the "stage builds" which are precompiled binaries optimised for the main CPU types (P1, P2, P3, K6, Athlon etc). It's your call.

Building a basic LAMP server (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) with postfix and all that stuff, takes about 5 hours on an Athlon XP 1800+ with 256MB and a 60GB ATA-133 HDD (our standard server platform). Building an X box takes rather longer!

That said, all our boxes are identical, and we use Ghost to image them, so a base-build takes only about 30 mins.

Management thereafter is easy using emerge, but it does pay, for commercial servers, to have a sacrificial box handy, because now and again something odd happens that needs investigation and special handling. Recent examples were the upgrade to postfix 2 and perl 5, both of which were significant changes. There are mechanisms for stopping overwrites unless required: all part of the learning curve. The help and support is superb using a BB2 board and ICQ. Oh, and Bugzilla.

Gentoo is very quick with security fixes and with new versions. Almost too quick! It's a full time job testing new stuff sometimes, so we're more selective about upgrades than some might be.

I think it's the biz, but it's not for everyone. I do think everyone should give it a try, and persevere long enough to realise its plus points over the "bad" ones (in contract to Your Fav Distro).

Cheers, Laurie.