Gentoo no more for my laptop

[pksings]

I initially installed it because I researched it, it was well supported, worked really, really well.

And it does, most of the time. Yeah, there was a significant learning curve, especially with etc-update, I lost a lot of config files. But it ran really solid if I paid attention.

In the last 4 months I have had a number of problems, one of which ultimately led to me formating the machine this morning and installing a different, binary distribution so I
could get some work done. And it took trying all of the 2.6.9 kernels to get my sensors AND usb working at the same time, what a fiasco that was.
I never did get my Clie to sync. And it worked the first time with Ubuntu.

I'm going to keep my server on it, it's really a pain to change. But my laptop is now running Ubuntu.

Thanks for all the hard work, I do appreciate it very much. There is an incredible amount of stuff to track, change and keep working, and all you maintainers do an incredible job. But I can't keep foolin' with it, I need something that just works. And initially it did with Gentoo, it just didn't anymore after a number of updates. Ubuntu isn't running on a really super new kernel, but everything works, USB, cdwriter, OpenGL, gpilotd, jpilot. Evolution with the Exchange connector, everything that I absolutely need. I guess time will tell how well it stays that way.

PK
_________________
PK

[etnoy]

Goodbye.
_________________
The md5sum of the above post is 06280ccd85ef9deb49c336e7945f4b5c

God is dead! - Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead! -God

[Titeuf]

I also love the It Just Works aproach of Ubuntu, but because its package manager isn't as good as portage IMHO, I back to gentoo.

[aqua26]

[Sayonara]

I have this "it just works" experience with Gentoo. Most of the default settings are fine for me. The portage system is just awesome and all the helping tools are just what I need.

I had Gentoo on my workstation for over two years. Due that time my harddisk, mainboard, cpu and some other hardware parts changed, but it was never a problem to adapt my system to the new environment. I just had to reinstall the system once recently, because I had messed up the compiler and lots of libs. Repairing would have take much more time, than reinstalling the whole system.

I now also have Gentoo running on my Twinhead Efio! 123A laptop. I emerged the software and drivers,...and it just works! I'm sitting here, battery powered, usb wlan stick plugged in and connected and typing this posting. The CPU runs on low frequency to save power. Standby and hibernate was not a problem.

The developers here, do a very good job to provide a stable, very usable and maybe most powerful GNU/Linux distribution you can ever get.

I've tried lots of distribution, but only Gentoo is really usable for me.

...
RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE for Linux newbies!
Debian for servers!
Gentoo for geeks!
...and Windows for bluescreen!

[ebrostig]

Another exmaple of PEBKAC!

Erik
_________________
'Yes, Firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'

[qubix]

I've also been getting sick with gentoo on my ibm 600x since evolution 2.0.2 came stable. The spamd did awsome work, but a pIII with 384 MB ram was not enough.... i ran openbox.

The sollution was obvious - i got a new lappy And i confirm - the "just works" ideology goes well with ibm x31. Even suspend-to-ram on acpi runs smooth
_________________
qubix

[nadi]

Gentoo is stable and nice, but when I bought my IBM thinkpad T40p two years ago, I could only activate the most basic hardware, but not the wlan, bluetooth and all the other awesomes hardware it supported. And I used alot of time. A lot. So I am now using dual distribution, gentoo for programming, and SuSe for all the toys my laptop supports.
N

[shash]

[man]

[tihkal]

Google is your friend

PEBKAC = Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair

[man]

ahhhh, hahahahah!
man

[Sayonara]

[odegard]

p233 mmx with xfce4... it's a dream

[sarah_t_s]

I have to admit Gentoo on 32bit has always been a case of "it just works" for the most part (the weird Epia MII PC Card memory hole not withstanding... but I've yet to find a distro or kernel that can work around this).

emerge and portage are simply fantastic for getting the newest patches/bug fixes/versions of software and considering I've managed to tie a lot of other systems in knots by doing strange stuff (I've broken YaST, RPM, APT in some quite colourful ways) the fact that it's survived my malicious conduct is quite impressive.

True compiling from source can be a right git, spent two days fiddling with KDE 3.3.2 trying to get kdelibs working... nadda, but the stateful way it handles things like webapps is fantastic for me, screen a session wham in emerge <fishcakes> and leave it alone to build a webserver for me.

I've yet to try it on a laptop through, the work stinkpad is off limits for playing and I'm dubious of the ATi 64bit drivers for my personal laptop, but I can feel it fast being the time to give binning windows another shot.

[halz]

I really can't see a laptop being a practical hardware platform for Gentoo, due to its by-design requirement to build from source at some point (..unless you just happen to have a server on the same network that can be tied up with builds)

I debated using Gentoo as my linux partition on the corporate laptop, which was at the time a Thinkpad T22 PIII 800Mhz decked out with 256MB RAM, but after realizing that it took 2 days of compiling on my AMD XP1800+ for a base-level working system.. it was obvious I had to go with something else that didn't require so much CPU time to get up and running.

[aqua26]