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.
gentoo will take a lot of time to install,approx 6-8hrs or so, I guess. but most of it is non-interactive--you just sit back and watch. but I think it'll be worth it, cause you get a very optimized system and bugfixes for apps mean that only the patches need to be downloaded...in all, I like a system where I have actually compiled the stuff myself. But the major part will be the source code itself...it'll take a lot of time to download it (Gentoo is ~200M and the rest depends on what you install) so just be prepared for it. If you're going to install it, get Gentoo 1.4rc1 and a stage 3 tarball for your system. Warning, though: the installation is not for the faint hearted ;-) take a look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml
Also hows is the installation of debian, I had tried an old one and lost a lot of data, all my mistake though. :-)
I had the same experience too, but not lost any data. Debian's installation is terrible, but once you get it up, it's very stable. But it's not so good as a desktop system...the ports lag behind significantly, and the -unstable releases are, well, unstable :-)
If you really DO download Gentoo and the rest, I'd be seriously intrested in getting it for myself, if possible ;-)