On May 19, 2005, at 2:54 pm, A. Khattri wrote:
Gentoo is an excellent distro, with one of the most comprehensive
repositories of packages of any Linux distribution. It is powerful and
excellently constructed. But to say maintenance and upgrading is easy is
like saying Windows is as suitable as Unix/Linux in a server
environment. It's just not true and realistic.
Depends what yardstick you are comparing against - if you've never had to
maintain RH boxes for instance you wouldn't know how much easier Gentoo
really is.
I spent last week trying to learn (k)Ubuntu, as I wanted a binary-based distro for my laptop so I can install packages on site without long compiles.
Perhaps I've just been using Gentoo too long (2 or 3 years now), as I couldn't wrap my head around it - Ubuntu seems to be very nice distro, and it is very polished out of the box, but it seemed to be missing things from the perspective of advanced configuration.
I bought this laptop in order to test 802.11g cards which I'll be selling as "guaranteed Linux-compatible", and all the support I could find in terms of wireless configuration seemed to assume you'd be using kWiFiManager or the equivalent to set up your SSID, WEP key &c. There is an /etc/networks/interfaces file, but for adding multiple (home, work, Dave's house) SSIDs it seemed nowhere near as easy to setup than recent Gentoo baselayouts.
After testing the second card I just gave up with Ubuntu, and installed Gentoo on it - using stage 3 & GRP (the latter for the first time) it took me 3 or 4 hours to get it to the KDE desktop, but I'm much happier now that I'll be able to get the latest versions of wi-fi driver packages and that I'll be sure that any problems are with the card & not with myself or my distro.
This is not a criticism of Ubuntu, as I'm sure at least half the problem was that I've become used to the Gentoo way of doing things, and that you can't teach an arthritic canine a new repertoire.
Stroller.
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