indiboi.com

I’m fully immersed in the world of gentoo linux now. It took me a while (two days I guess) to get everything compiled and running the way I’d like… but I did start from a stage1 tarball. Basically, instead of installing a pre-compiled OS, I compiled everything, and I do mean even the compiler, hah, on this system to matchup with this system’s specs.

The more I use gentoo, the more I absolutely adore it. I’ve been able to get many little “perk” type applications compiled and running whereas before in Mandrake, Redhat, or SuSE, they never worked.

Granted, it takes a decent bit of skill to get it all up and running, but then once it is… well, it just works! The portage system with emerge is amazing, simply type “emerge package” and it downloads, compiles, and installs the package automatically making sure all the dependencies are also satisfied. It is far superior to the rpm system.

The biggest benefit, other than being able to make it look much better (the theming just works better for some reason), is that it is incredible as far as speed… compiling everything for the cpu you have really does make a massive impact.

I still have a lot of little things to do, in particular I need to get network printing working, but otherwise I’m set. I sort of regret not going xfs for the filesystem, but Reiser is very good. I think it’s just sort of a geeky prestige thing… xfs just seems “cooler” hahaha. Of course, hell, I have gentoo now… and it works, so that automatically gives me bragging rights over anybody using a pre-compiled distro. I sort of understand now why all those gentoo users were being such brats… :)