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Niomi
December 20th, 2004, 02:36 AM
Hello, my name is Niomi... I'm fifteen years old and I've been a geek-in-training since my dad bribed me away from the TV with my first computer-- it was a 286 with Windows 3.1 :)

I've been curious about open source software for quite some time. My primary browser has been Firefox for over a year. I tried to install Gentoo on a spare computer about this time last year. Turns out, Gentoo is one of the most difficult distros to install. After hours of fustration I gave up... and was scared away from linux for quite awhile.

Ubuntu looks like it will be a simpler install... but I'm still nervous. Wish me luck! I'll be eagerly awaiting my CD in the mail.

mark
December 20th, 2004, 02:43 AM
Hello, my name is Niomi... I'm fifteen years old and I've been a geek-in-training since my dad bribed me away from the TV with my first computer-- it was a 286 with Windows 3.1 :)

I've been curious about open source software for quite some time. My primary browser has been Firefox for over a year. I tried to install Gentoo on a spare computer about this time last year. Turns out, Gentoo is one of the most difficult distros to install. After hours of fustration I gave up... and was scared away from linux for quite awhile.

Ubuntu looks like it will be a simpler install... but I'm still nervous. Wish me luck! I'll be eagerly awaiting my CD in the mail.
If it's any consolation, I've tried to install Gentoo at least a couple of times & never got it to work. I think you'll find Ubuntu to be much easier to get running.

Best of luck - and post here if you have any problems!

jdong
December 20th, 2004, 03:27 AM
Ubuntu's installer is the simplest one you'll find in the Linux market.

Don't let the textmode design fool you -- it sports all the features you need, and the much-wanted just shut up and start installing mode!

MaZiNgA
December 20th, 2004, 03:36 AM
Seems like a time to reveal myself now...I have also failed a Gentoo installation...:( :P
Welcome to the Ubuntu community!!Ask us anything you want

Adrenal
December 20th, 2004, 03:40 AM
Seems like a time to reveal myself now...I have also failed a Gentoo installation...:( :P
Welcome to the Ubuntu community!!Ask us anything you want
Why does toast always land buttered side down?

amoser
December 20th, 2004, 04:10 AM
Why does toast always land buttered side down?

So you can put jelly/jam on the other side of it.

~Alan

MaZiNgA
December 20th, 2004, 04:56 AM
Why does toast always land buttered side down?
That's easy...This can be analyzed in two parts:


*Precalculating the toast's total weight around 36gr it gains a Uo of 7.2m/sec and an estimated a=1m/sec^2. Also a rotating power (R1) makes it swirl around the y-axis(see fig.1a). Taking into mind that there are connecting powers of 5N between the toast and the butter and that the atmospheric pressure is no more than 1atm, the butter can't gain an acceleration >2m/sec^2 in order to detach from the medium's corpus. Estimating the weight of the butter around 17gr we have a (very high) possibility of 47.2% of finding the butter heading down after the first swirl, and 67% after the second. This percentage increases as in a hyperbolic function, and reaching 99.7% after 3.7 flaps(!), thus rendering the medium <very> likely to reach the floor with the butter heading down.


*Now from a psychologic point of view this is very easy to explain. As in Murphy's law, certain things happen when we <notice> they happen. In other words, we see what we want to see. It is highly possible that the toast has fallen again with the butter heads up <yet> you din't notice because you said in your subconcious mind "Hell, that's normal...". Now, the very the so-called "toast" was falling butter-down this time you said "Why must I be so unlucky all the time...! Are all odds against me?". Of course this whole process is being controlled by your subconcious mind which is all the time telling you <what> to believe, judging by your feelings, your mood, your previous experinces with falling toasts etc. So this also applies in your selection of the word "always" in your sentence and the -probably- aggressive tone of your sentence, which definately implies that you hate falling toasts.

TravisNewman
December 20th, 2004, 05:39 AM
*LOL* I don't exactly think they were looking for that kind of explanation, but it's funny anyway :)

K6-III
December 20th, 2004, 08:34 AM
I, too, have never been able to get Gentoo to install.

Ubuntu is a completely different experience...

shimon
December 20th, 2004, 08:48 AM
gentoo is the werst distro ever there is one thing m$ did right and that is make every and give it out to the end user in binary form

wulf
December 20th, 2004, 09:41 AM
gentoo is the werst distro ever there is one thing m$ did right and that is make every and give it out to the end user in binary form
Are you quite sure that's the opinion you want to express on a Linux board? Only, I can see somebody heating up the tar and someone else has just run off for a bag of feathers... ;)

Gentoo might be more of a learning experience than many other distros but that's a choice you make. Being also a user of Microsoft products I can certainly say that not everything works straight out of the tin... and then you have to wait for them to fix it!

Wulf

inha
December 20th, 2004, 10:56 AM
If you want control over everything in your system and programs, including the base system, compiled especially for your computer you can't get anything better than gentoo. It's all about what you want from the distro.

ubuntu_demon
December 20th, 2004, 11:20 AM
If you want control over everything in your system and programs, including the base system, compiled especially for your computer you can't get anything better than gentoo. It's all about what you want from the distro.
Is the performance increase worth the trouble ? I don't think so at least not for the average user. But I haven't seen benchmarks. Do you have benchmarks ?

jdong
December 20th, 2004, 01:02 PM
By feel, Gentoo is slightly faster than Ubuntu -- BARELY noticeable, but can accumulate during heavy tasks -- i.e. video compression, Gentoo lands on top by at least 5 minutes every time (2 hour process). Not a big deal, not with all the trouble Gentoo brings.

ubuntu_demon
December 20th, 2004, 01:20 PM
By feel, Gentoo is slightly faster than Ubuntu -- BARELY noticeable, but can accumulate during heavy tasks -- i.e. video compression, Gentoo lands on top by at least 5 minutes every time (2 hour process). Not a big deal, not with all the trouble Gentoo brings.
nice to play with for nerds but no real reason to use then ?
Or does someone have an url with a benchmark showing big differences ?

BWF89
December 20th, 2004, 01:32 PM
Ubuntu looks like it will be a simpler install... but I'm still nervous. Wish me luck! I'll be eagerly awaiting my CD in the mail.
The CD isn't going to come for so many months. Just download it and burn the ISO...

What's up. I too am new to the world of GNU/Linux and open source. I've been fanatically into it for about the last 4 months. It's great more people like yourself are switching to GNU/Linux instead of just going with the crowd and installing Window$...

ralph_ubuntu
December 20th, 2004, 02:37 PM
nice to play with for nerds but no real reason to use then ?
Or does someone have an url with a benchmark showing big differences ?
Using both gentoo and ubuntu I wouldn't say that gentoo is really faster, at least not that you notice if you use it on the desktop.

However, one of the big advantages of gentoo or source based distribution in general is that it really gives you an amount of control over your system binary distros don't provide, or at least can't provide that easyily.

So, please don't bash a distro because it doesn't do what you want from a distro (simply take an other one) and don't judge it by the rather immature people who think the main advantage of gentoo is to make their box faster. (examples can be seen at funroll-loops.org)

MaZiNgA
December 20th, 2004, 04:53 PM
*LOL* I don't exactly think they were looking for that kind of explanation, but it's funny anyway :)
Thank you panickedthumb! you're the only one in this thread who laughed with my joke! Now I know it was worth the 30minutes I stole from my life to think about it!

Now to all gentoo-bashers: stop it! Every man can use the distro that suits him best.

(Yet I shall have to echo demon666's expression "nerd distro" - seems to be fitting :D )

ubuntu_demon
December 20th, 2004, 05:04 PM
Now to all gentoo-bashers: stop it! Every man can use the distro that suits him best.

(Yet I shall have to echo demon666's expression "nerd distro" - seems to be fitting :D )

thnx :-D

PS I wasn't trying to bash gentoo. I was just curious.

BWF89
December 20th, 2004, 05:13 PM
I thought it was funny. I just love it when people use complex answers to answer simple questions...

Great job, you've raised the intelligence level of this forum 10 fold...

Quest-Master
December 20th, 2004, 05:25 PM
Personally, I don't feel the few advantages Gentoo has over Ubuntu are that great. Having to compile and install Gentoo simply detracts from all of Gentoo's good points, and makes it unusable for people who want ready-to-go distros like Ubuntu. ;) Plus, on systems like mine, compiling and then installing something like Gentoo can take almost an entire day.. why do that when you can get Ubuntu working in less than half-an-hour? :D

wulf
December 20th, 2004, 05:32 PM
Thank you panickedthumb! you're the only one in this thread who laughed with my joke! Now I know it was worth the 30minutes I stole from my life to think about it!
You mean it's not available on the Internet somewhere? If that's your own working, you definitely ought to publish it around - it's such a common question and your's is a great answer :lol:

Wulf

az
December 20th, 2004, 06:17 PM
"Personally, I don't feel the few advantages Gentoo has over Ubuntu are that great"

Well, the advantages of open-sourced software dissapear when you do not use the source!

Also, you have a finer-grained control over dependancy hell.



Anyway, you get a choice. Nobody`s selling you a computer with gentoo pre-installed.

Niomi
December 20th, 2004, 07:09 PM
BWF89- I took your advice I downloaded the distro last night, prepared to leave my computer on all night to download it. The thing downloaded in about fifteen minutes. o_O You'd think an entire operating system would take a lot longer to download than that... shows what I know.

I'm going to burn it and atempt an install on my old compaq today. Wish me luck! If it goes well, my next project will be getting it to duel boot with WinXP on Osiris (my main computer).

That toast diagram is halarious, by the way. XD

BWF89
December 20th, 2004, 09:35 PM
BWF89- I took your advice I downloaded the distro last night, prepared to leave my computer on all night to download it. The thing downloaded in about fifteen minutes. o_O You'd think an entire operating system would take a lot longer to download than that... shows what I know.

I'm going to burn it and atempt an install on my old compaq today. Wish me luck! If it goes well, my next project will be getting it to duel boot with WinXP on Osiris (my main computer).

That toast diagram is halarious, by the way. XD
Geez, it took me 30-40 minutes to download Ubuntu for Intel, I too have a Compaq...

jakeslife
December 24th, 2004, 04:55 AM
Ubuntu may have a non-gui installer, but it's pretty damn good. I would equate the look to that of an early DOS/Windows 3.x game, but you have a lot of control over the install. It's so streamlined that you can browse straight through it if you want a default install, it's not redundant about things, and if you want to tweak the install before it's done (ie: partitionin, etc.) it's prety easy to do so, providing you know what you're doing.

If you don't mind reading some docs about things, and would like to know your computer a bit better, go for it!

I've heard geek girls are cute. Maybe it'll get you a date! :-P

mr_ed
December 24th, 2004, 04:36 PM
Heck, even the Windows XP installer is text and menu-driven at one point.

piedamaro
December 24th, 2004, 06:25 PM
Anyway, you get a choice. Nobody`s selling you a computer with gentoo pre-installed.
Look here:
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml

3. Computers with Gentoo Linux pre-installed

Note: Contact Kurt Lieber if your company sells systems with Gentoo Linux pre-installed.

The following companies sell computers that come pre-installed with Gentoo Linux.

North America:
Linux Certified, Inc. ($20 donation per sale)
Ineo Concepts ($20 donation per sale)
Micronux ($20 donation per sale)
rayServers (portion of each sale is donated to Gentoo)

Europe:
Proteus Computer Systems (£20 donation per sale) (UK)

Australia:
VG Computing provides servers, desktops and notebooks with Gentoo linux pre-installed for Australian customers. VG Computing donates $20AU to this project for every system shipped with Gentoo Linux pre-installed.

chz
December 24th, 2004, 06:39 PM
Also, you have a finer-grained control over dependancy hell.

i always find it funny that people complain about the dependency thing, because i too have had the issue until i switched over to debian based distro's. no matter what distro you use, you always have dependency issues. i think the hardest is directly through source, because sometimes you dont even know whats missing! and then rpm's...that technology needs some HUGE work done to it.
so "Q?" for the gentoo users, the emerge command...does it find all the dependencies and builds those from source? if thats so, very nice, but man, that could take forever just to get, for instance, xmms to work properly.

mark
December 25th, 2004, 02:58 PM
Hello, my name is Niomi... I'm fifteen years old and I've been a geek-in-training since my dad bribed me away from the TV with my first computer-- it was a 286 with Windows 3.1 :)

I've been curious about open source software for quite some time. My primary browser has been Firefox for over a year. I tried to install Gentoo on a spare computer about this time last year. Turns out, Gentoo is one of the most difficult distros to install. After hours of fustration I gave up... and was scared away from linux for quite awhile.

Ubuntu looks like it will be a simpler install... but I'm still nervous. Wish me luck! I'll be eagerly awaiting my CD in the mail. I'm not sure when the next CD shipment will go out. If you have a problem downloading the ISO & burning it to CD, let me know...I've got a couple of the 4.10 CD packages I've saved for emergencies...and I think that insuring that a "fifteen-year-old geek-in-training" has the minimum daily requirement for a good Linux experience qualifies<g>.

Niomi
January 3rd, 2005, 03:15 AM
Sucessfully got my spare box, Guinny, to dual boot on first try! Weee! I put Ubuntu on my main box today, I have XP and Ubuntu on seperate drives.

Working on trying to get the drives to share files now... nether of the OSes are detecting the other drive. I don't have my files from XP onto Linux yet, so I'm still running XP for the most part.

Randabis
January 4th, 2005, 06:02 AM
Yes, emerge downloads all required dependencies and compiles them. It works very well, but compiling your base system with X and a gui takes forever. That's why I'm glad they have precompiled packages available for people doing stage 3 installs. I like gentoo, but I don't like waiting on things to compile, so ubuntu provided a nice middleground.