ive tried.....

Redhat 8/9
Fedora Core 1/2
Slackware 10
Mandrake
BLFS (beyond linux from scratch, built up a full distro)

and still wasnt happy... then i tried Gentoo !

so.. gentoo allows 3 different starting points called stages.
stage 3 is a finished gentoo distro
stage 2 is a working, but minimal command line only distro
stage 1 is... nothing.. just a few tools and a bootstap script.

i chose stage 1.

my system has been fully compiled by me.

now. in Linux From Scratch, you compile from nothing, but its much harder and slower. everything has to be done by you (which is great if u want to learn, but 99% of it is repetative extract, patch, configure, make, install...

in gentoo, its all done automatically ! dependancy tracking, compiling, everything !

ALSO.. LFS explains almost nothing about optimisation... Gentoo has a huge section, explaining everything. and as a result, my system is optimised specificly for my exact hardware... None of this i686 crap... im optimised for my Athlon (yes, athlons are i686's but so it most of the pentium sseries (specific optimisation is better)

at the moment, im compiling 3 thigns at the same time.... my processor is at 100% in use... and yet my desktop and web browser are perfectly resposive. you dont even notice that your system load is insanely high !!!

and possibly the best part....
the program 'emerge' emerge is a bit like YUM for fedora.. or one of the other programs that automatically downloads and installs things for you...

but emerge is better... in fdora's yum, the supported packages it extremely limited !

in gentoo, its insane !

here is how i installed gentoo !

read the gentoo install guide...
make the partiton etc etc etc

then run a script..
sh ./bootstrap.sh

then follow the book still.. just tweaking a few things..

done !

from now on, its emerge all the way !!

You want Linux ?
emerge system

done.. !

you want XFree86 or Xorg ?
emerge xorg

done

you want KDE ?
emerge kde

done

you want firewall ?

emerge firewall

you want file shareing (apollon) ?

emerge apollon.

want accelerated nvidia drivers ?

emerge nvidia-kernel
opengl-update

its insane ! everything you could possibly want...
automatically downloaded, configured for you system, optimised and compiled, then installed.. all with one simple command !!!!

gentoo KICKS ASS !

and the gentoo 2.6 kernel is auto patched with very powerfull speed optimisations.

the one drawback..... it took hours to compile KDE..
and it will take 10 hours to compile Open Office... but you can install pre-compiled un-optimised versions of things like that if you choose.

ive tried many major distro's... none even come close to gentoo !

phew... breath !
its been a long time since a linux distro has impressed me sooo much !

You've been p0wn3d by gentoo, lol.

*cough*I run 6 gentoo servers at work, and love every moment of it *cough*

powned ?

Some stupid slang that people who think themselves l33t use. A variation on owned, but horribly misspelled. Usually used to express superiority, e.g. "i p0wn j00"

riiiight... even as a kid a hated slang words !

you went to school one day, and every1 was using some random word...
but if they used it the next day, they got laughed at cos it was out of date ?

and most of the time they didnt even make sence...

i remember "Dan" meant good... then the pepsi adverts came on tv... so "Dan to the Max" was born... ugh !

qwijibow, I know exactly what you mean. I went through the last 3 major releases of every major distro and a ton of small ones. And their was Gentoo. I love it so much. It just works, the perfect balance of speed and control. I will refain from talking about 'emerge' because trying to express it in words would be like saying "That computer guy" in reference to Linus, it would just be wrong and an understatement.

Its a Crime that Gentoo doesnt even have a sticky Thread to explain why Gentoo doesnt have a forum.... SUSE's got one !

lol.....

That rocks so hard. I went for an interview last week and the Linux guy was running some Fedora 2 servers. I asked him why they went with Fedora. He said, "Well I don't want to use it but corporate people think anything other then RedHat or Fedora is some crazy voodoo linux distrobutions."

What do your 6 servers do at work?

The reason Gentoo doesn't have a dedicated forum is due to the exact same reason Suse doesn't have a forum: LQ has a policy that a dedicated forum will only be created for a given distro if two conditions are met, namely, that the distro is popular enough to make a separate forum worthwhile, and second, that an official representative of that distro agree to participate in the forum. To date, Gentoo has declined all invitations to participate in an LQ forum. Thus, the absence of a separate forum is due to Gentoo's decision, not LQ's. In the meantime, any Gentoo-related questions can be posted here in the Distributions forum. -- J.W.

i was actually just joking... that wasnt a real complaint... (i use 3 '!' points for rel complaints )

anyways, yeah, i knew its cos there isnt much demand.. didnt know you require a representitive though.

I tried 3 times over the course of about a month, using the Gentoo guide (which is awesome), to install Gentoo on my Compaq Presario 2170us notebook with no success. I was able to boot into KDE once, but neither my keyboard nor mouse worked. I had used Mandrake 9.2 before and liked it so I went back. I upgraded to Mandrake 10, tried FC1 (unimpressive) and SuSE 9.1 (very nice), and several smaller distros but always came back to Mandrake. I'll try Gentoo on a desktop box someday (or week as the install time goes), but Mandrake works for now. From everything I've heard, read and seen Gentoo is great, but a little over my newbie head to install yet.

Thanks for this thread because I was planning to install gentoo (which now using FC2)... emerge is fantastic I think... But I have several questions... I am planning to select stage 1 so I will need networking a lot... Sometimes network goes down for like 15 seconds - 1 minutes... Could this cause a problem or not? Second question is if I choose genkernel, could it decrease performance compared to personally compiled kernel... Which kernel option do you suggest?

THanks all!

"the network goes down for 15 seconds"

there is a simple fix...
whenever the guide tells you to "emerge somthing"
instead, do this...

"emerge --fetchonly somthing"
if your network dies, you can re-issue this command untill all the files are downloaded. downloads will resume after a dead connection.

then buid..
"emerge somthing"

as for the genkernel question...
yeah, a genkernel will not run as fast as a customised kernel...
but thats true for all distro's. all distro's give you an general kenrel.

i would advise you to use the dev-gentoo-sources (2.6 kernel)
and configure it yourself...

the kernel is the most important thing to optimise for speed.

Yeah I use gentoo-dev-sources as well and it rocks pretty hard.

One thing you can do, if your not too familiar with compiling your own kernel, is run genkernel first. Once genkernel is done go into /usr/src/linux and run make menuconfig. Since genkernel compiles everything that is needed into the kernel you can now simply remove whatever you don't need to get a working kernel with a little less bloat. Then you can compile the kernel again manually.

if your going to do what Crahsed_again surgests, first edit the genkernel script so that after it has generated the config, if doesnt comile a kernel that you aint even gonna use...

kernel compiling can take a while...