Hi All.

I've been using Fedora Core 2 and Whitebox on another machine for a while
now.
Now, I keep hearing good reports about Gentoo
Would my RHCE knowledge help me with Gentoo?
Was Gentoo like Mandrake, loosely based on Redhat in the past or is it's
roots somewhere else?
Does Gentoo use .rpm ,.deb or other format?
Basically, if I have the generic .rpm of a package, can I use it?
Probably a bunch of stupid questions there, but they had to be asked
Thanks.

--
Jafar Calley
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Registered Linux User #359623
http://fatcatftp.homelinux.org

jafar <jafar@fatcat.delicats.net> wrote:

> Hi All.
hi there

> Would my RHCE knowledge help me with Gentoo?
> Was Gentoo like Mandrake, loosely based on Redhat in the past or is
> it's roots somewhere else?
As far as I know, Gentoo isn't based on any distribution, but I'm not
100% sure

> Does Gentoo use .rpm ,.deb or other format?
Gentoo uses its own package manager (portage), its very simliar to the
BSD ports system..

> Basically, if I have the generic .rpm of a package, can I use it?
You can unpack it

Sorry for my bad english

--
Too lazy to disable signature!

jafar wrote:
>
> Was Gentoo like Mandrake, loosely based on Redhat in the past or is it's
> roots somewhere else?

Portage, the driving force behind Gentoo, is similar to BSD ports but
claims many advanced features over this.

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-manual.xml

> Does Gentoo use .rpm ,.deb or other format?

It uses '.ebuild' files to build the packages from source.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/portage-manual.xml
> Gentoo Linux itself is often referred to as a Meta-distribution. It
> consists of Portage and more than 8000 sets of package build recipes
> called ebuilds. These ebuilds tell the Portage engine how to compile and
> install a software package.

> Basically, if I have the generic .rpm of a package, can I use it?

You could... but it's likely ebuilds are available, which are /much/
preferred.

Hth,
--
Ben M.

* jafar (2004-08-22 22:31 +0200)
> I've been using Fedora Core 2 and Whitebox on another machine for a while
> now.
> Now, I keep hearing good reports about Gentoo
> Would my RHCE knowledge help me with Gentoo?

Yes.

> Was Gentoo like Mandrake, loosely based on Redhat in the past or is it's
> roots somewhere else?

RedHat? No. Maybe a bit Debian.

> Does Gentoo use .rpm ,.deb or other format?

..ebuild - which is just a thin shell-script wrapper around the orginal
..tar.gz. In a way you could say that Gentoo has no special package
format.

> Basically, if I have the generic .rpm of a package, can I use it?

No. You could install rpm or transform the rpm to tar.gz but that
makes no sense. Gentoo installation is traditionally by compiling the
source.

Thorsten

Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> No. You could install rpm or transform the rpm to tar.gz but that
> makes no sense. Gentoo installation is traditionally by compiling the
> source.

There is the odd accasion where the vendor of a certain piece of
software only release their application (closed source) in RPM format
(IBM is the main one that springs to mind - possibly Oracle too). That's
where transformation applications (like rpm2tgz or alien) would be of use.

The problem that arises with something like that is that the vendor is
usually relying their application to be installed on a certain version
of Red Hat or SUSE. Then it's the case of attempting to find a version
of the Linux distribution "supported" to then copy over all the other
dependency libraries.

....Ric

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== Do you, uh... Gentoo? Gentoooo-hooo!! ==

jafar wrote:

> Hi All.
>
> I've been using Fedora Core 2 and Whitebox on another machine for a while
> now.
> Now, I keep hearing good reports about Gentoo

I switched from Mandrake about 14 months ago ... am REALLY glad I did.

> Would my RHCE knowledge help me with Gentoo?

Yes, but Gentoo has the best online documentation of any distribution I've
used.

> Was Gentoo like Mandrake, loosely based on Redhat in the past or is it's
> roots somewhere else?

Nope, it's based on basic linux, more the basic flavor of Slackware, BUT it
as it's own package management system that sets up the compilation for you
more like the 'ports' system on FreeBSD. It's very nice.

> Does Gentoo use .rpm ,.deb or other format?

See above, and portage is SO much better!!

> Basically, if I have the generic .rpm of a package, can I use it?

You'll probably never need to. I've found it MUCH easier to find packages
for Gentoo than Mandrake or Redhat.

> Probably a bunch of stupid questions there, but they had to be asked
> Thanks.

Sure ... :-)

--
John McCubbin

Thank you all for your comments. I have decided to download and test
Gentoo on my laptop which I use to play with things and break them etc..

Cheers!

--
Jafar Calley
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
d+ s-:+ a C++++ L++ E--- W++ N++ w-- PE- t* 5++ R+ !tv D+ G e* h---- x?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Registered Linux User #359623
http://fatcatftp.homelinux.org

jafar wrote:
> Thank you all for your comments. I have decided to download and test
> Gentoo on my laptop which I use to play with things and break them etc..

Well if your laptop happens to be a Toshiba P20 or Toshiba P25
(/shameless plug/), you'll find that most things will work fine under
Linux. I can personally vouch for it myself. If you've had Red Hat on
your laptop before, and you've got RHCE accreditation, then you should
find that Gentoo will be about the same.

The only thing I find with Red Hat Linux (well up to version 9 - can't
say much about the Enterprise series) is that they sometimes move things
in the file system that aren't the same with Gentoo. Otherwise at the
end of the day, Linux is Linux (not matter how much Red Hat patch the
2.4.x kernel). If you're worried if Gentoo is going to work or not, you
could always throw Knoppix into the CD drive (assuming you have one) and
boot off that. That's always a good inidication of Linux on a machine.

....Ric

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Just remove the "--NO_SPAM"
== Do you, uh... Gentoo? Gentoooo-hooo!! ==

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:51:20 +1000, ric_man wrote:

> If you're worried if Gentoo is going to work or not, you
> could always throw Knoppix into the CD drive (assuming you have one) and
> boot off that. That's always a good inidication of Linux on a machine.

The Laptop is an old, old, Dell Latitude CpiA 366XT or in human speak,
PII 366, 128Mb RAM, 12Gb HDD.
It has had Mandrake 9.2, 10RC1, 10RC2, 10 Community, Redhat 7.2, Redhat 9,
Fedora Core 2, Suse 8, and Whitebox installed on it so I'm fairly
confident it will run pretty much any distro of Linux

As for the filesystem, as long as I can find networking configs and set up
the login to my Fedora Machine via dhcp for the wife, everything should be
ok If that works ok, I can look at putting it on the main machine where
the fun will begin <gulp!>setting up Apache, ftp, Spamassin etc all over
again. </gulp!>

--
Jafar Calley
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
d+ s-:+ a C++++ L++ E--- W++ N++ w-- PE- t* 5++ R+ !tv D+ G e* h---- x?
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Registered Linux User #359623
http://fatcatftp.homelinux.org