Reasons for the change

I changed from Fedora to Gentoo because as a Software Developer I wish to always be one with the latest and greatest version of software. I was usually updating via ‘apt-get’ but I found that alot of these repositories since Fedora is a binary distribution would only release bug fixes for the version already running on the system. Other times I was too impaitent for this so I would compile from source with no particular optimisations and just installing it over whatever was in the /usr directory. This would sometimes end in tears with me breaking my installation compleatly.

I became annoyed that I would have to wait a whole development cycle of around 6 months before I could get new releases of software and that I needed to get all 3 cd’s just to upgrade my installation.

The change

So one day when I was looking into upgrading to Gnome 2.6 on the Gnome User’s Board I read that you could easily upgrade Gnome using Gentoo. So over the next few days I started to read the Gentoo Handbook and also searching the Gentoo Forums I came to the conclusion that my experience levels were well above what was needed to install Gentoo.

So I went about installing gentoo and haven’t looked back. I used genkernel to make my kernel but I did:

$ genkernel—menuconfig all

With this command I was able to change the options to optimise my system by making a sepcific Duron (my cpu) kernel and turning on “Pre-emptive kernel” and removing all of the modules that I had no need for. This gave me a quick way to configure the kernel and still customise it a bit for my machine. Now when I upgrade my kernel I still use genkernel:

$ genkernel -gconfig -no-clean -no-mrproper all

This just uses my old config and I can go through the gtk config to find all the new features.

As for the difficult setup I recon if you know a couple of Unix commands and are comfortable with everything the handbook says then give it a go. A stage 3 at least is really quite easy. Now I have an optimised system compiled for my particular hardware. And the system evolves as different packages are upgraded via the Portage system.

The key features of Gentoo that made me a very happy Linux user:

  • Continuous upgrades via Portage (No more downloading ISO’s)
  • Portage quickly follows release of software
  • Non-open source programs are packaged such as nvidia X drivers and Sun’s jdk
  • Source based distrobution, ie. Long time to install because everything is compiled by your computer however this makes everything optimised for your system

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