Gentoo vs. Sabayon

[handy]

Beagle has been slowing down Sabayon, I've just done the xdelta thing & made a 3.4f DVD, apparently beagle only works when called now, at the moment in my 3.4a it can be using 80+% of cpu power, & I never use it!

It was easier to do the upgrade than for me to uninstall beagle, as it has connections.

To the topic, Sabayon suits me, I've gone past wanting to customise everything, the few bugs don't bother me, the speed is fine & about to become much better (fingers crossed), their community is small compared to Ubuntu, but it is quite friendly with a helpful forum.

The graphics display is superior to any OS I have ever seen, I don't know why but boy is it crisp.

The Sabayon dev's will have to do something dramatically wrong for it to come off my #1 machine. then again, someone else may do something that especially suits me & win me over.

It's great having so many choices.

[handy]

I'm currently in the loooong process of installing Gentoo, & no other O.S. has taught me so much during the installation.

I expect I'll be through tomorrow, so it will have taken me about 3 days!

[yabbadabbadont]

That is usually how long it takes me to get my Gentoo system fully configured. It doesn't help that there have been both gcc and glibc updates since the stage files were last built. (I wish they would update the stage files whenever that happens...) I'm waiting for them to be rebuilt in November before I put Gentoo back on this machine.

[handy]

It looks like I've gone from the sublime to the ridiculous when it comes to customisation!

On various distro's & PC-BSD, I have been happily only customising my fonts to suit 1280x1024 or higher res, changing the desktop wallpaper, fiddling with the panels & menu's & adding removing a few app's, customising Firefox a little, that's about it for the last couple of years.

Now I have discovered USE=" " & kernel compilation, amongst other things, oh boy!

Looks like its back to the old days of make 'em just how you want 'em, & nothing has ever given me the control that Gentoo has...

Therefore 3 days, though I expect I'll take longer than that being my first time through. Then I'll start playing around with the kernel more...

I do understand why Sabayon exists, it is a really easy quick install, with everything on the DVD. Most users don't want to spend days installing their OS. Most don't have the time to start with.

[handy]

I have spent about a day (day #2 in the Gentoo install process so far) trying to get X installed on Gentoo; during the process I have built multiple kernels, unmerged my initial modular X, installed monolithic X, provided the prescribed USE=" " flags, read lots of the great Gentoo documentation, read some of the good X.org documentation, & it still will not work!

Having posted on the Gentoo forum I have received a reply saying that it is not actually X's fault but the 2.6.23's kernel's, & that I must build the nvidia-drivers module using a sandbox parameter to get past this problem:

FEATURES="-sandbox" emerge nvidia-drivers

I have not tried this as yet as I have decided to have a whole day of not trying to install Gentoo, so that I may continue to enjoy the process... That's not tongue in cheek, I am actually enjoying the process.

I am learning so much about Linux; I certainly would not recommend Gentoo to anyone who wasn't at least somewhere in the intermediate stage of familiarity with Linux. I'm only just there myself, but I come from a history of supplying professional support to the windows world, which probably helps, I am also determined :--: which I believe is a computer tech' support dude's initial prerequisite qualification everything else follows after that.

So, by the time I get Gentoo installed, which should be sometime this year my Linux knowledge base will have grown dramatically from what it was before I downloaded the 54Mb Gentoo install .iso.

The bottom line is:- Anyone who wants to have a look (beyond the ever so easy Sabayon) at Gentoo, should be prepared to spend at least 3 big days, (that's an all going well scenario) & be prepared to learn an enormous amount about the Linux kernel based OS's, (that's of course if you don't already know it), & know that you will get a Linux kernel based OS that is customised to have not much more in it than what you put there.

A caveat on that:- Because the Gnome, & (especially) the KDE meta-packages have such huge amounts of software included, you have to make a choice to spend the time (as I will) to sort through & manually install only that which you require (or at least as best we can in that regard).

Due to my simple computing requirements I have been basically a Gnome user who appreciates that KDE is (at the least) a far more configurable desktop than Gnome;- having learned this from my experience with PC-BSD & PCLOS.

Due to the aforementioned, I am using the Gentoo /etc/make.conf file with the USE="-gnome -gtk2" parameters, including other appropriate calls (which I've forgotten at the moment), (all calls under the "-" prefix are masked in program compilation, therefore playing a major part in creating programs with or without the chosen dependencies. Gentoo has even more control than this regarding masking, but I have not learned about it yet.

The above, is for my personal learning experience as much as anything else, I really don't need any more speed for what I do; by the time I have successfully installed Gentoo I will have gained another stripe on my belt re. IT; please don't get me wrong, that was not an ego statement, its just a reflection of the fact that some processes enforce intense learning & installing Gentoo certainly can (under certain circumstances) be one of them.

[zapcojake]

I think they are precompiled yes. That is why I did the stage3 tarball installation via a chroot from ubuntu.

Is there a howto for this? I would be very interested. Thanks

[mips]

Is there a howto for this? I would be very interested. Thanks

Did you even bother looking at the installation handbook?

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...ok_part1_chap6
or
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-...ickinstall.xml

There really is no difference whether booting from a livecd or an existing linux installation of any sorts.

[zapcojake]

Did you even bother looking at the installation handbook?

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...ok_part1_chap6
or
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-...ickinstall.xml

There really is no difference whether booting from a livecd or an existing linux installation of any sorts.

yup, I have installed Gentoo a couple of times from the cd. Thanks for getting snippy though. What I wanted to know is there any Ubuntu specific things I needed to know.

[rsambuca]

I am not sure what you mean by "Ubuntu specific things". When it comes to installing via chroot, you are just using a terminal, so it doesn't really matter if you are doing it from Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Arch, Foresight, etc.

[mips]

At the expense of sounding snippy again.

There really is no difference whether booting from a livecd or an existing linux installation of any sorts.