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Re: Linux Mandriva [message #18388 is a reply to message #18386]

Thu, 25 September 2008 19:16

chickenk
Messages: 169
Registered: May 2007
Location: Grenoble, France

Experienced Member

Hi,

I'm glad you have a look at it. I won't say it's the easiest to install, but you learn a lot when following the Gentoo Handbook. I learnt 75% of my basis Linux knowledge installing Gentoo.

just some answers about Gentoo regarding your requirements:

Quote:

be programmer friendly

Damn. Nearly everything if compiled from source, so I bet you can expect a rock solid and full featured programming environment. Most gentoo users are in fact programmers.

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have latest Gnome(currently i'm using it) or latest KDE by default(perhaps XFCE could be an option, but speed doesn't matter)

Gentoo has the latest everything. dot. Tip: add this line to /etc/make.conf:

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86

(or equivalent if using another platform) and you'll have the bleeding edge, but more frequent updates.

Quote:

don't use RPM packages (use *.gz(source), *.deb or other "internationally" format)

Forget about RPM. you _can_ use RPM if you want (you can virtually choose any packaging system you want), but the main and official packaging system is portage, and is based on the famous BSD ports. Basically, portage downloads the official source archive, and uses a script (ebuild) to know what to do with it. Very flexible. Dependency tracking is the best of all distros I know.

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Upp run on it

Of course it does! There even used to be an ebuild for it, but unmaintained... Nevermind, fetch the sources or install through the .deb file.

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is fast (including load, unload)

Gentoo is designed to be fast. My computer starts (including X session and Enlightenment DR17) in about 10 seconds. (Honestly! I'm not joking.). you'll find everything else slow after that.

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have support for my wireless network card(if i will use it on notebook)

Portage supports lots, lots, lots of packages. Most of the time, drivers are very well supported and when they are not, following the native instructions from the vendor always work because gentoo tries a lot to follow Unix standards.

I'm sorry that I did not find any negative points about your requirements... That would have made the discussions less biased and maybe more instructive. Gentoo is not perfect, but it's by far my preferred.

Lionel

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