Discovering… and liking Gentoo Linux

Posted on 04 May 2004 by avinash

20040503-icon-gentoo.png

I’ve been using Gentoo Linux for about a week now and I can say that I’m rather impressed.

In fact, Gentoo is a breath of fresh air for me, a (previously) die-hard Redhat (and then Fedora) fan.

Having to build your own system from scratch and then install exactly what you want is great. Compiling everything from source also gives a great sense of satisfaction except that you must be patient… but you get optimal performance in the end. Another nice aspect of Gentoo is that the downloadable ebuilds (sources + build scripts) are very up to date : Linux kernel 2.6, Gnome 2.6, KDE 3.2, Mozilla 1.6 etc.

So, for me, Gentoo is a winner ! I give it 10/10 :-)

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About avinash

I am the Managing-Director of Knowledge Seven Ltd, provider of quality consultancy, support and training for open source software. I am also an amateur photographer and musician. I use a Google Nexus One Android smartphone, an Apple MacBook, Mac OS X, Linux and a lot of open source software. I am married to Christina and we have two wonderful kids, Kyan & Anya. In case you are wondering, Noulakaz means "our home" in my native language, créole.
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5 Responses to Discovering… and liking Gentoo Linux

  1. Eddy Young says:
    05 May 2004 at 00:06

    Of course, we, FreeBSD users, have been doing this since FreeBSD first appeared. Avinash, the “emerge” feature of Gentoo Linux is an exact copy of “make install” on FreeBSD.

    (Gee, I start to sound very controversial now :-)

  2. Shane says:
    05 May 2004 at 17:47

    Eddy, you always point that one out whenever the subject crops up :P

    I’m a big fan of FreeBSD myself.

    [shane@junq:~] $ uname -a
    FreeBSD junq.sytes.net 4.9-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE-p5 #0: Wed Apr 21 13:56:21 WST 2004 root@junq.sytes.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/JUNQ i386

    FreeBSD 4.10 is in RC2 right now. There will be an RC3 before it is becomes the next production-ready release. The one I am really waiting for is FreeBSD 5.3, when the 5.x branch will be declared stable. FreeBSD 5.x has OpenBSD’s pf firewall, which I want to give a spin.

  3. Eddy Young says:
    06 May 2004 at 00:58

    Maybe I’m just a whistleblower after all. I have not used FreeBSD since 2002. Now?

    krabappel:~/Dev/Projects/java/Registry jeyoung$ uname -a
    Darwin krabappel.local 7.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.3.0: Fri Mar 5 14:22:55 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.3.15.obj~4/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
    krabappel:~/Dev/Projects/java/Registry jeyoung$

  4. Shane says:
    06 May 2004 at 07:02

    Eddy: Too bad that FreeBSD’s support for the PPC architecture isn’t so good right now. I read about your experiment with gentoo on your ibook.

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