On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 07:39:39 GMT, Shan Destromp wrote:

>Captains log; stardate Saturday 17 January 2004 11:13 am, Lieutenant Bill Davis reported that.......
>
>> I am really having fun with Gentoo so far, but all my experience is on
>> Distros that do stuff automatically and that I am having to do manually
>> now. Makes for a different experience, but now I realise that this is the
>> way that I should have learned Linux to begin with.
>>
>> Thanks again
>> Bill Davis
>
>I agree, Gentoo is the type of Distro most people should atleast LEARN on, even if they don't stay
>with it. I started with RedHat about two and a half years ago (with 7.2) on a secondary machine,
>and followed all the way up to 9.0 (Buying a copy of 7.3, 8.0 came with the RH bible, and got a
>year of the RHN to get RH9 faster) and then switched to gentoo in the early spring of 03 when I
>finally got fed up with the way RedHat hacks and crippling alot of their software (using unstable
>packages and hacking them to get them to work, mucking with the way KDE and Gnome look a la MSFT,
>moving file locations et al, and I finally jumped into gentoo (I tried a few others in between but
>never found one to suit). What initially kept me with Gentoo was Portage.
>
>Anyways, to make a long story short, when I swapped to Gentoo it was like a whole new (much
>brighter) world. Once you relearn things to match gentoo, everything is so much easier, faster,
>more stable...well I could keep going on for weeks and still not finish the list....

I agree, gentoo is great to learn from as you build up from a very minimal
system - you can see the wood for the trees.
I too tried a few distros. Starting with redhat in '97 then went on to suse,
mandrake and debian. I finally stuck with debian for a server distro. It's
easy to maintain, very reliable and you can apply security updates without
fear of things breaking. It is a little conservative for a desktop for my
liking so I use gentoo on my workstation. The 'compiling everything from
source' approach makes it very easy to use sources that are not part of the
distro. That need is becoming less and less but we'll never have everything
available as ebuilds. One thing I have found is it's best to avoid the
heavily patched kernels in portage if you want to use some third party
kernel modules. In my case, the vloopback driver doesn't work with
gentoo-sources. Though that's slightly academic now as I have moved to
vanilla 2.6 and it doesn't work with that either!