Gentoo

[Desmo]

Anybody here used it?
I used it years ago and it reminded me very much of slackware, very configurable, but painful as fuck to use.
I have an Ubuntu AFP/Torrent box with X and gnome etc, and I'm putting Gentoo on it as we speak, going to try and pare it down to the bare bones and see how it runs.
Any hints?

[Desmo]

Lots of ginning around, but Jesus, it's quick.

[TORQ]

/desmo chats to himself

[Desmo]

Shutup ringworm.

[TORQ]

It's tapeworm dude ...

[Captain Starfish]

YAY!!!!!

By the looks of it, Gentoo now has a userbase.

Well done, Desmo.

[druu]

I used it years ago when I was on a PC. Made me feel elite, lol. It was good for customization though, I remember I was running fluxbox window manager and all that jazz.

[Desmo]

YAY!!!!!

By the looks of it, Gentoo now has a userbase.

Well done, Desmo.

Cheers for the vote of confidence

I used it years ago when I was on a PC. Made me feel elite, lol. It was good for customization though, I remember I was running fluxbox window manager and all that jazz.

Yeah, this is running XFCE, R/Wtorrent and netatalk/avahi.
Definitely the fastest and least bloated OS I've played with.

[D'Artagnan]

Jim, calling you a "user" may not be a good thing :p

[MikeC]

Give us a comparative review Desmo. Is it more/less painful than Ubuntu/RH/whatever you've been using recently.

[Desmo]

It's a lot more involved, no GUI installer, and all the apps need to be built from source as opposed to just downloading the binaries.
This is good if you have the time, as you can set your own USE flags and variables, but it is VERY time consuming (especially on an old Celeron with 1GB of RAM).
The base system is only about 100 odd Megs, which is just your base file system.
You can use a Genkernel, but building your own is the way to go.
This machine was only supposed to be a torrent box and file server, so I wanted to slim it down as much as I could.
My first forays in Unix was with Slackware 4, and then RH, and more recently Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is great, you throw the CD in and it does the rest, great for a first time user.
With Gentoo you need to manually configure all your conf files (xorg, netatalk etc etc) which takes it out of the realm of your average "I want to try Linux" user.
Although it is blazingly fast. Well worth the install if you can give it your time.

[goof]

When I tried it 4-5 years ago it didn't make much difference over the speed I was used to with my usual Debian install. Reviews at the time agreed. Both had custom compiled kernels so the OS itself wouldn't be much different. Custom compiled apps would help a bit I expect, but for my money I'd prefer a (x)ubuntu install, with a custom kernel and 'apt-get remove' as much bloat as you can.

[Desmo]

It was more an exercise for me than a need for Gentoo.
Just wanted to try something different.

[goof]

Quite a sense of achievement when it all works eh?

Now go try OpenBSD while you're in the mood. When I tried (years ago) the thing wouldn't even boot.

[Desmo]

Yeah, it does give you a bit of a 1337 feeling when it's all working and you know exactly how it all went together.
I might throw Ubuntu on a spare drive and see how this kernel goes on it, be interesting to see.
Is BSD much different to Linux?

[goof]

Dunno, didn't get that far. I believe the GNU type commands will be much the same, but interfaces, configuration files, etc will be all different. Most of the same apps will be there. Isn't BSD what Mac's are now based on? I'm sure I've heard you say you used a Mac once?

Must be a good day for it, I just hacked a Nokia N73 phone I was given in the UK (mobiles are disposable over there), unlocked and un-branded it, put a new case on. It's just like a bought one now.

[Desmo]

Yeah, I'm in a nerd mood at the moment.
And yes, OS X is BSD based.

[magwitch]

Is BSD much different to Linux?

The main reason BSD gets selected over any flavour of Linux in a commercial environment is the much more permissive nature of the BSD licence so you can use it in binary only releases/embedded products without giving the rest of your shit away.

FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer so in practice I don't think you'd see any difference in function or performance. There are some differences in a few areas like loading kernel modules (modprobe vs kldstat etc) and abstraction (no /proc).

[lee]

I value having spare time

[Desmo]

I have spare time.