Gentoo continues to amaze...

[nosrema]

Its not as if I don't already have a ton of reasons to sing gentoo's praises, but I am once again impressed with the quailty of application support.

I have been a linux user since May '99 when I got DSL and needed a firewall/router. I had played with Mandrake 6.5 that previous winter but never did much other than reinstall it when I needed to fix something . Since then I have fully converted to linux in all aspects of my computing arenas. At home on the desktop, at home on the firewall, at school on the server, at research at school on the linux clusters, on my laptop. I use it for gaming as well. I haven't gotten rid of my win98 partition for two reasons. Those games that will never get ported, and when some one sends me a stupid .exe.

That leads me to my reason for posting. I know I don't have to reboot for exes because wine can do alot of stuff, and winex supports alot of games. But even though I know alot about some linux stuff, when it comes to wine and winex I have never figured out how to use them properly. Mainly because if it doesn't work after I compile and install it I am too lazy to hack through the monsterous config file to get it working. On previous distributions I had tried the prepackaged wine... nope didn't work. I also tried wine from cvs or a snapshot off the latest source... nope still couldn't get it to do anything useful. I just left it alone for awhile.

In May of this year I made the switch to Gentoo becuase one of my friends did the Linux from scratch thing and I was jealous. Then I went to a LUG meeting at my University and I told someone that I was fed up with redhat and I was going LFS next time. One guy said.. "hey have you looked at gentoo?" I now run gentoo exclusively except on the three linux clusters I administrate for school research (and hopefully my master's thesis ).

Well this summer I borrowed a friend's WarCraft3 disk and I decided I would try the winex another shot. I went and grabbed the sources and tried to compile and setup myself. I ran into the problems like every other time. Then I check portage and saw it had winex. I was blown away at how easy it was to install in run WarCraft3 with the winex in portage. I did follow someone's guide about which 4 dll's to grab off of win98 before preceeding but it worked very well. Yesterday I got an .exe from someone for school and I decided to try wine again. I wondered if it would be just a easy as winex and, of course, it was.

We just recently had another LUG meeting and I was able to show off to a bunch of die hard debian and slackware guys Unreal Tournament 2003 running off of my Gentoo LiveCd on my laptop. I even hooked it into the projector and everything. But to my suprise when it booted up to the gentoo live cd about 7 or 8 people in the room gasped and said "Ahh.. gentoo, I run that" or "Oh yeah I have heard of that new distro". It was great.

Anyways, many thanks to the wonderful developers of gentoo. What a nice piece of work!