neorants

It’s been a long time since I’ve tried a new Linux distribution, or even used a Linux distro extensively on a desktop machine, but my new favorite toy is most definitely Gentoo Linux.

I had been making it a point to look for a new Linux distro of choice since Red Hat finally went with the whole Enterprise Linux/Fedora Project thing. I stumbled across Gentoo due to a mention it received in a FreeBSD versus Linux comparison article I read recently.

This distro has something for both the geeks and the newbies. You have the option of starting out with a “basic” Live CD, and manually setting up all your partitions and filesystems, then downloading a tarball of the most important system sources, bootstrapping your own compiler and commencing to compile the rest of your system from scratch. A time-consuming, but rewarding experience.

The flip side of this so-called difficulty is in the incredibly newbie-friendly fact that they’ve put together something called the “portage” system, which is very much like the FreeBSD ports system. If you haven’t had the privilege of witnessing the FreeBSD ports system in action, let me tell you that it’s a thing of beauty. Portage, like the ports system, will take a single command and download the source for an application, apply any necessary patches to get it running within the parameters that your OS expects, compile, and install a program. This makes installing new applications a simple matter of typing something like emerge xfree86, then walking away. Several hours later you’ll have a fully compiled (and optimized according to your processor type and optimization flags!) copy of XFree86 waiting for your use.

Anyway, I have a few more emerges to run right now, so I’d better get back to it. In the meantime, you should go check out Gentoo Linux, and maybe read some more about it in their discussion forums.