SoaDMTGguy

I have seen a lot of people on this forum advicating using Gentoo Linux, which leads me to ask why? What makes Gentoo so great?

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PROBN4LYFE

Nothing...just like Athlon XP vs P4....
It's a phase us junkies go through to help ease the pain of spendin' all this loot for a GREAT rig...then along comes new technology...start again.

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The_Jester

Gentoo has amazing customisability and speed. Everything is compiled and optimised your your processor(s) and ram etc

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christian_piper

It's likee this- Gentoo is one of the most customizeable distros out there- Kinda like a ASUS mobo vs Dell...

And can be optimized to YOUR hardware- Similar to overclocking IMO..

SoaDMTGguy

So what options does it give you? How easy is it to use? How do you go about customizing it?

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christian_piper

You customize it by doing EVERYTHING from scratch..

It is NOT made for ease of use....


The handbook tells you in detail how to install it- take a look.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml

theRemix

yeah my first install took me 2 weeks 2 years ago, my first linux distro, only the 150+page manual that i printed at school and the gentoo forums to help me.

theres 2 things that make gentoo the best linux distro...
customization - in almost every environment, ubuntu, mandriva, fedora, debian, suse, windows, you install apps by downloading the binary executable and all needed libraries and sticking them into the correct places to run... an installer usually does this for you (apt-get, .msi, etc) and the program runs... great, but never has there been an environment setup in a way that you build the executables on your own system, not the developer's. Now there is, that's gentoo's purpose, to allow you setup your own environment the way you want it (stable or bleeding edge) and your own system creates the app that it's going to run... using a great tool called 'emerge' which downloads all the needed source files and all it's dependencies (no more dependency-hell) and compiles and installs them for you.... all in one command. and you have complete control over it, and theres a central place to keep your package tree updated called portage... so a simple thing as running #emerge --sync will synchronize your portage tree, and you'll be able to view and run updates with again... another single command or even update EVERYTHING with #emerge -U world
yeah it takes a while to compile some things... but most apps only takes seconds (on an overclocked monsterous machine like mine) to a minute, other bigger ones can take hours, like Xorg and OpenOffice. The reason why it's a good trade off is because you will have faster apps when it's done.

the second reason is- support... by nature free software lacks support, but forums.gentoo.org is literally the best linux support forum... so good that even non-gentoo users go there for help. It's even been nominated for a couple categories in LinuxFormat magazine as "The best linux resource" and some other thing... competing against others like Google.com !


so is it worth it to take the time to read the manuals, ask the forums, and wait for compiling just to have a Gentoo System? yes!

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screenshot of BFG-c2d on gentoo linux
http://remixtechnology.com/view/bfg-...deo-screenshot

SoaDMTGguy

So, what exacty do you mean by compliling all your software?

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dangerousHobo

./configure
make
make install
make clean

Its how you compile and install a program (went your not using a package manager like RPM)

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theRemix

yes thats how you compile an app... in gentoo, it's just "#emerge app-name" then it does all that including updating and installing all required dependencies.

so i mean compiling everything on my computer since installation, everything i run has been built by my own system. compiling means turning human readable source code into executable binaries.

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screenshot of BFG-c2d on gentoo linux
http://remixtechnology.com/view/bfg-...deo-screenshot