Gentoo install takes a huge number of hours if not days. I have installed gentoo on a high end machine with KDE and GNOME and it took me 1.5 days. It takes a lot of time to compile the packages. As someone else pointed out, Gentoo installs are not for the "faint hearted". It takes some courage/perseverance to be actually able to sit through all those long hours of downloading and compiling. But the result is a highly optimised system. You will actually feel an increase in the power of the system. Installing from the stage 1 tarball is just like a pretty version of LFS(Linux From Scratch). But on the upside, once u have installed Gentoo, u probably wont need to change the OS ever. just a simple "emerge world" every night would make ur system bleeding edge everyday.
If u do plan to install Gentoo, then goodluck, and please, PLEASE, take a printout of the install instructions from the Gentoo site before u actually begin doing anything. And remember to set ur USE flags in /etc/make.conf
Debian installs, on the other hand are less painful. Dont expect to see anything like the pretty installers of RedHat, Mandrake though. Once installed, Debian is very easy to maintain and and software to. Just use "apt" to do pretty much whatever u want. The apt tool is actually also available for rpms now in the form of "apt-rpm".
HTH,
On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Amish K. Munshi wrote:
On Wednesday 13 Nov 2002 4:46 pm, Ashish Kulkarni wrote:
get Debian, Gentoo requires you to download and compile everything that you need. that sure makes for a lean and mean system, but most of us here don't have permanent internet connections...unless you're one of the lucky people who have cable/DSL/whatever. From what I've heard,
I am indeed blessed with a permenant connection, however it is a slow one. Does gentoo take a lot of time to install since it probably will compile everything? I would like to have the KDE 3.1 (beta will do) which comes with gentoo. Also hows is the installation of debian, I had tried an old one and lost a lot of data, all my mistake though. :-)
Gentoo is very responsive coz it directly optimizes for your
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Bhargav Bhatt Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York.