Questions about Gentoo

[Siphon]

Hello, I have a Thinkpad notebook and currently installed the new Ubuntu 9.04. However I'm not that convinced that it is the right distro. First, the software in the repos is often from an older version (Eclipse, Mplayer etc.) and when trying to manually install stuff like tp_smapi, I was bombarded with error messages using make and no way to find out how what to do. Thankfully I was able to find others with the same problem, but there was no way I would have known what to do otherwise... Of course that's not always the case, but still... can't say I like it very much.

So a friend of mine told me about Gentoo. He talked about it before and I only remembered that you had to compile all the stuff on your own and even though I'm a computer science student, I can't be arsed to manually compile stuff. Well he said its easier now so with an "emerge x" it compiles all on its own and you just have to wait.
Plus the repos seem to be full with recent versions of software I won't ever find in Ubuntu and it would be rare to encounter bugs like the ones I had with that one compile job.
Another good thing is that software is updated regularly and not in Ubuntus case once in 6 months so I don't have to reinstall the system all the time.
So far it seemed to be like Heaven

So tell me, is it hard to work with Gentoo? It's not like I don't want to learn about it, but when I'm bombarded with some random errors all the time when I have to compile stuff on my own then thats not fun at all!

Oh and another thing, when installing software, are you able to remove it with like 2 commands or clicks and leaving no traces behind? Because if make had no uninstall flag or so, I'd be screwed and search around for the files that were installed etc. :/
I also want to encrypt my /home partition so my data is secure in case I forget it somewhere or it gets stolen. Is this doable without me becoming a kernel guru or something like that?

[V-Li]

Portage is a package manager with similar features as all others out there. So it removes the software you installed without a trace. Gentoo asks some more maintenance time, but gives you more flexibility. Sorry, no time for a longer answer.

[Siphon]

Good that there is a package manager, but what about packages that aren't in the repos? I don't know how recent the one of mplayer is, but if I do a svn checkout and compile it on my own, I have to use make too, right? So if there is no make uninstall or the likes, do I have to manually search the files the program installed? Or are there tools that monitor the changes and do a rollback?

Apart from this, everyone feel free to answer the other questions. I'm very interested in this distribution and think it may be the right one for me.

[szczerb]

You gave a great example. The newest version of mplayer in portage is now 9999 which is simply live SVN.

Now about the case of uninstalling stuff. It is pretty obvious that you can't expect the package manager to clean up the mess you made manually, right? So if you grab sources of something and compile and install it manually, then obviously portage won't know about it so it can't get rid of it. BUT instead of installing it manually you can write an ebuild for the package which in a lot of cases is supposedly trivial. Then it will be installed by portage and you can remove by a simple `emerge -C package_name` ;]

Just take a look at the handbook, the rest of the official docs, the unofficial wiki and get started with the install.

[lyallp]

Lets put it this way. I created a Gentoo VM under VirtualBox - the plan was to have it on my usb key.

It took me a couple of days to get a workable system - how I like it. For others, it may take less, I have my idiosyncrasies.

Still, this setup time may seem like a long time but my Real Gentoo system (the one I run VirtualBox in) is still the original install from over 4 years ago using a stage 1 install. That's the great thing about Gentoo, no 'New Release, trashes everything' - it's ongoing, you are always up to date, so long as you do a regular 'emerge --update --deep --newuse world'.

This installation has survived 2 complete hardware replacements (mobo's, video, etc), multiple disk crashes and is still going strong.

Try that with Ubuntu (Kubuntu).

Additionally, every piece of software is built with MY compiler settings for MY CPU, using the shared libraries I have installed - very little of 'you need version X of Y so you can install Z', and what there is of that, 'emerge' handles it.

Not everything is sweetness but ever since I moved to Gentoo, I have never looked back. I have kubuntu on a key, as a curiosity, but that was while I was building my Gentoo for the key.
_________________
...Lyall

[monsm]

In the last 2-3 years I have only installed software from outside Portage once or twice. Last time was when I wanted to try the new release of SuperTuxKart (the car racing game). I made an ebuild for the new release and installed that way (using emerge). The new release made it to portage before I could send in my ebuild to the portage managers.

My old box was compiling 120 packages over night earlier this week. It was almost finished when I got up next morning So on old harware, like mine, things take time, so updates sometimes need to be planned a bit. Its good we have the package masks and USE flags, so you can decide when (and what) to update larger components. At the moment I am considering upgrading to Gnome 2.26. I have been putting it off a bit to wait for it to become more stable. It isn't quite stable yet, but should be good enough, so what I need to do is to add some lines in a config file in order to "unmask" the new release.

So when thats done I run a new update over night and my system will have a brand new Gnome the next morning. Thats mor or less how things work. You have lots of control over how up to date you want your system to be and luckily no need to wait for a new "offficial release".

Actually the lack of normal releases makes some people think gentoo is dying. Its not. We don't have releases in that sense. In another sense we have new releases every week, since we make a new boot CD every week (although ones your system is installed you won't need it any more).

Mons