Forum Moderators: bakedjake
I wasn't able to post to the old thread, so I created an continuation. I just wanted to give you guys an update on this. I actually follwowed nalin's and Elijah's recommendatioin and gave Gentoo shot. I had tried out all sorts of other distros (Mandrake, Yggdrasil, Suse, Debian, Redhat). Allthough the recent distros' installers are very easy to use and shiny, when their done I felt like I didn't know what was going on on my system, how to configure it beyond what's offered by the installer and the various GUI utensils. For example, I found these GUI wizards for tweaking things like network and firewall really annoying because they do not parse the current configuration. Instead they always start with default settings, forcing you to configure everything from scratch. If you changed the config files manually, you can never ever use these tools again.
Today, I use Gentoo Linux on a tiny notebook as well as a full-blown dual Xeon server and I must say that I am really happy. With Gentoo I feel like I am in total control of my system. Installation was quite a hurdle but the documentation takes you through it step by step. I had to read it thoroughly but that was worth it because I learned a lot about Linux in general as well.
I saved the best things for the end: a Gentoo installation never gets stale! I recently updated my notebook using 'emerge --sync; emerge --update world' and it just worked. Ever tried upgrading your Suse or Redhat? You see what I mean. Another thing: I did a Stage 1 installation on the server because I wanted everything -- I mean everything -- compiled for Xeon cpus ("-march=nocona"). Tell me one other Linux distro that can do that.
