Gentoo + Red Hat?

[Chris Hickman]

What I'm going to ask/suggest may be sacrilege for some, but I'll give it a shot anyway I've been using Red Hat 8, waiting for Gentoo 1.4, and there are things I like about both...I like the ease of use/administration with GUI tools in Red Hat, and the fact that emerge w/Gentoo avoids the dependancy hell of RPM. Is there any way I can import the GUI admin tools to a Gentoo system, or use Emerge on a Red Hat one? Especially the display utility and partitioning utility...for instance, to switch to the real nvidia driver, I downloaded the kernel and driver, installed them, then went to the configuration utility and changed "nv" in the drop-down to "custom" and then typed "nvidia", restarted the system and I was done! No X configuration nightmares (took me a week in Gentoo, and no I'm no super Linux user, but I'm not a dummy either).

In short, I guess I'm looking for a system that provides the ease of use and installation of Red Hat, with the flexibility of Gentoo's emerge when I need it, to bypass RPM's. Is this possible?

[abhishek]

There is apt-get for rpms. It's not quite as powerful as emerge, but it's decent.

[Chris Hickman]

You're kidding, right? I learned RPM's and SRPM's, I learned emerge, and now you want me to learn ANOTHER packaging system, APT?

[Mnemia]

I was pretty disappointed with apt-rpm when I used Redhat. I used it a fair bit, but I found that the repositories weren't always updated in a timely fashion when new RPMs came out, and apt-rpm broke at least one of my systems beyond repair. apt-rpm did do some things Portage still can't, like automatic uninstallation of unneeded dependencies and removal of apps that would be broken by uninstallation of a library. But, it just seemed way more flimsy and breakable than Portage. Several times my RPM database was so screwed over by this program that rpm would not run at all in any way. I'm sure I could've fixed it somehow had I been a total RPM guru, but who really wants to be that? Portage just works and is easy to fix when it breaks.

That said, some more GUI config tools for Gentoo might be nice. I've learned not to rely on them, but there are definitely some times that they could save me a good deal of time. I wonder if more of the Redhat/Mandrake/Debian tools could be ported to Gentoo without the need to have a Redhat-like bird's nest of interdependent scripts? Why oh why do those distros have to make up their own configuration methods for everything instead of just using the normal ways so that it's actually possible to do things by hand?

These two issues (RPM and apt-rpm's fragility and the hideous configuration/init script setup) are the reasons I left Redhat for Gentoo. Now I'd like to see if we can get some of the GUI goodies onto Gentoo. It's not something I really need urgently, but it would certainly broaden Gentoo's appeal.

[slougi]

[janneand]

To get the RH tools to work well in Gentoo is probably more work than to learn how to do things the Gentoo-way. And if you learn it the Gentoo-way you can use most of that skill in all other distribs aswell since the RH tools is only a layer on top of all the interesting stuff.

-J

[Chris Hickman]

[Mnemia]

For most things I think that text files are better. However, I think there's something to be said for having a GUI alternative as long as it doesn't impair my ability to use regular text files to configure my system. That's a big problem on the more commercial distros: they destroy the utility of hand editing the text files in order to facilitate the GUI.
I like the control I have editing all my own configuration files, but that's not for everyone. For instance, my girlfriend has been a Linux user for almost as long as I've known her (~2 years) and she doesn't like to use text files. For the more casual user who isn't into reading all the man pages it's nice to have that option.
Yes, I think that Gentoo is a power user's distro and that it should stay that way. But I'm saying that it wouldn't hurt to accomodate other types of users as well if we can do it without losing flexibility. Gentoo could be at the same time a great distro for the power user and the typical user. I think there are quite a few people who would be interested in Portage but are put off by the perceived difficulty of configuring Gentoo. I don't think that it's really very difficult at all, but that's the perception. Portage could allow Gentoo to be used as a "better Redhat" if we had some nice configuration tools.

[Chris Hickman]

Exactly. I still want command line to be fully function, I just want GUI options to be available. Emerge doesn't need GUI though, because if you can't handle emerge...you didn't get it installed first of all, but you shouldn't be using Linux!

[metalhedd]

the only thing holding back something like this, is the same thing holding back alot of the ideas that are brought up here on these forums: Someone to do it. The developers have more than enough work already on their plates, and adding a gui config tool will definitely NEVER Appear on their todo list. if you want the tools, do it yourself. Make a few small programs for changing some settings that you commonly change, and package it as gentoolkit-gui or something. If you submit an ebuild it _will_ get into portage, but if you just request it on the forums you can guarantee you're not going to see it (gui stuff anyway, its very low priority)

I wouldn't mind seeing gui front ends for alot of stuff in gentoo, but i'm also not planning on programming them myself so I Guess im S.O.L.

[Pigeon]

Hmm, well, I think it would be easier to write your own configuration utilities than to port any other distro's utils over.

And at this point, the benefits of having a GUI configuration suite isn't worth the hassle of writing and (more importantly) maintaining it.