Short story on why to choose gentoo...

occe · Apprentice Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 171 Location: Sweden

Hi,

Ive been using Gentoo for quite some time know, and i really enjoy it, especially the portage system that easy keeps the system up2date. Before I used SuSE, a distributions that is very user friendly, and when my brother decided to install Linux, i told him that SuSE would be the best way to start. So of i went to him with a boot cd for SuSE 8.1 and installed the system via FTP. The system was up and running pretty fast, but this is when i encountered some troubles, 1st of all, KDE and Xfree was pretty out-dated, so i thought Id just start the YOU (Yast Online Update) and install those RPMs, but they werent there. And after spending a lot of time searching, i found out that i had to download the rpms myself, and how funny could that be? with all those dependencies and finding out witch packages to choose...
Well, a couple of hours trying switches like -Uvh and -nodeps, the system just went no good at all....

have no idea what packages i got, and which i don't.
So, i stopped, and will install Gentoo as soon as possible instead......

And I who thought that SuSE was easy? will definately stick to Gentoo.
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aethyr · Veteran Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 1085 Location: NYC

As far as I know, for the main distributions like Suse, Redhat, and Mandrake, they usually provide "updated" RPMs to bugfix things from that release.

For example, Redhat 8 might have new versions of Xfree 4.2.1 (I'm making this up, I'm not sure what version it used), but it won't have Xfree 4.3 RPMS. Or as another example, Redhat isn't going to release their glibc, binutils, gcc with NPTL for Redhat 8.

However, when you get the new versions on cd, you can use that to upgrade your system rather than a clean installation.

There are ways to get around this (using apt4rpm and pointing your source to a new version fo the distribution for instance) or changing a file that up2date checks for version info.

Note, this has just been my experience with a few of the big RPM-based distributions, but I could be wrong (I've never used Suse).

edit: changed the word "update" to "updated". It conveys what I meant to say more accurately.

christsong84 · Posted: Fri May 02, 2003 10:42 pm Post subject:

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Fri May 02, 2003 10:55 pm Post subject:

You have to really dig to find the command, and it is buried in the readme file that is in the same directory with the updated XFree86 rpms.

# rpm --nodeps --force -Uhv *.rpm

Just make darn sure that you have the necessary versions of the required libraries. (I know, what's the point of rpm if you have to check versions)

It was stuff like this that prompted me to switch from SuSE to Gentoo. Although I don't regret buying the four or five professional versions of SuSE that I have. I occasionally still find solutions to the odd problem in the manuals that came with SuSE.

krusty_ar · Posted: Fri May 02, 2003 11:40 pm Post subject:

If you want a quick and easy linux install you can go with gentoo or with mandrake, mandrake releases updated rpms for the main packages (such as kde).
I was able to go from kde2.1 (or 2.2) to kde 3.0 just a few days after it was released and all went fine (mandrake was 8.1 btw)
To resume, there are distros that are more "libre" that others (like mdk IMHO) and others that tend to make you buy a boxed cd or the like (like rh and specially SuSe)
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