Gentoo vs Debian

[sbovisjb1]

I was reading on the internet, when a article popped up saying that gentoo is what debian was 3 versions ago... is this true.
http://singe.rucus.net/blog/archives...vs-Debian.html

[falko]

I've never used Gentoo. I always use Debian on my servers because it's stable and mature, and I love apt!

[danf.1979]

I used gentoo not long ago. APT is far more mature, fast and confortable than porthole system (emerge). Last time I checked, if you had installed package X that depended on Y and Z, and some day you decide to uninstall Z or Y, you don't get any warning about package X. This will eventuallu get fixed ofcourse. Anyway, emerge is slooooooow, but there are some faster alternatives.
Compiling everything is just not practical. Is like saying "Oh my god! I need openoffice to do some work for tomorrow!" and you're just compiling X (heh).
And regarding speed, there is not really a noticeable difference.

[sbovisjb1]

Thats why the guy was so ****** off, because gentoo (ive seen this) has sometimes taken 48hrs to compile!! (This was on a slow system)

[JohnS]

Originally Posted by sbovisjb1

I was reading on the internet, when a article popped up saying that gentoo is what debian was 3 versions ago... is this true.
http://singe.rucus.net/blog/archives...vs-Debian.html

Not true if you mean the age of the software. Debian software is ancient compared to Gentoos. Also:

The following two HOWTOs provide a binary installation of Gentoo:

GENTOO 2006.0 Gnome, KDE and Xfce in less than 3 hours.

http://linux.coconia.net/gentoo/2006.htm

GENTOO 2005.1 Installation Script/Walk-Through.

http://linux.coconia.net/gentoo/2005.htm

You can have GENTOO 2006.0 Gnome running in 15 minutes.

[sbovisjb1]

I see, but what me and my friend were getting at is that emerge is impractical, we have installed gentoo before in the past... but the funny thing is that he finds flavors that other people take and modify so that it is better/easier to use... well they are fun to use. He got a Gentoo flavour off a forum that doesnt exist anymore in 2004 and only 74 people had downloaded! Also another extremely good Gentoo Version is the hackthissite live cd... i found it to be quite powerfull and stable and it help me and my friend to analize quite a few security vulnerabilities and on top of that it comes with 100+ hacking/security related tutorials... its great i learned so much about firewalls from it. Anyways... who could tell me how to install the Gentoo Hackthissite live cd... just what would have been done for a gentoo live cd. Thanks!!

Cheers

[22hosting]

I have to say that Gentoo's compiling from scratch is a GOOD thing. If you compile everything the way you want it it's going to be far more streamlined than just sticking binaries straight on there...

[sbovisjb1]

Yes but most people dont have the patience or time to do that. The only reason that a linux system administrator would do that, is if his WHOLE system is identical and therefore he could get away with porting his configurations to the other systems... then he would have a fanatastic network.

[22hosting]

If you're putting in the infrastructure of a new network, chances are that most of the pc units will be the same to begin with. All you need to do is create one from scratch and ghost it to the whole lot.
Although granted, not everybody can be bothered, but if you're a tedious sysadmin (as most arent) then you will have the right thing in mind for security by compiling from scratch and removing unwanted components. Plus with the speed of most modern processors compiling gentoo from scratch really doesn't take that long. Hell, winblows takes about 40 mins to 1 hour on a P4...

[nkassi]

I've seen a really nice thin client (diskless) of about 50+ computers running gentoo and FreeBSD. They are used at McGill University for there Computer Science labs. The nice thing is that distcc allows them to build pretty fast.

I'm a Debian person now but for a long time (since gentoo 1.0) I've been a gentoo fan. Although in recent times syncing portage is terribly slow compared to what it was couple years ago. Seriously they really have to fix that because Apt takes 1 min to update it's tree compared to 15min for emerge.

Nic