Tht title says most of it....I can't live without my slack....but I love gentoo's portage system. I have installed gentoo from stage1 about 50 times, but I'm always going back to slack because I feel lost in gentoo even with the VERY good online documentation. My main problem is adapting to the new init scripts. rc-update just would not work correctly for some scripts...I'm too used to slackware but I really want to learn gentoo. Can I use slack style init scripts ( i think they're called system v scripts) in gentoo? Can anyone recommend anyplace that will help me besides the gentoo docs? I am not a linux newbie....been using it as my primary OS for over 5 years....I'm just having a hard time adapting to a new distro because of my great experience with slackware. Any help appreciated. TY

Dude - if you are so stoked about Slack, why change? You seem to be changing distros just for the sake of changing distros - obviously that's your prerogative, but I don't see the point. 'If it ain't broke, don't fixi it' -- J.W.

I'm sorry, I should have clarified further. I want to use Gentoo due to its large portage system, and to have total control. Slackware does not allow me to do such a thing. I like Slackware because I am very comfortable editing files to make my changes, though that knowledge can be passed onto any other distro, which is why I chose to learn Linux with Slackware. Now that I have learned, I want to further my knowledge and experience with Gentoo. Why Gentoo? Because I love the idea of being in total control and building a system from scratch, and LFS wasn't that great IMO. If I want, say...Mozilla Firefox installed, I'd much rather have it built against my specific architecture. On top of this, Gentoo downloads, compiles, and installs it automatically, whereas in Slackware I have to do all of that manually unless using an external tool such as Swaret or Slapt-get...and then, I'm stuck with installing binaries without any compilation and a much smaller tree of software. Gentoo has all the software (a LOT) I use in it's portage tree. I'm sure you already know all of this, but I'm clarifying for any other readers. Is this not a good reason to switch? Why is it a bad thing to learn a new system?

Sorry - it definitely was not my intent to imply that learning a new distro was a bad idea or that my comment should be taken as discouragement. Apologies for that if that's how it was taken. Instead, it's just that your original post sounded like everything was so perfect with Slack, and thus, why not stick with a winner?

Obviously, expanding your knowledge/experience to include Gentoo (or any other distro) could only be a positive, beneficial thing, so I'd encourage you to give it a shot. I myself once tried get Gentoo up and running a few months ago when I had a free weekend, but I couldn't quite get the hang of it. Good luck with the project. -- J.W.

Its funny because I was using Slackware for a while and I was so used to Gentoo's init scripts that Slackware's sys v scripts seemed very odd to me. I'm sure if I stuck with Slackware I would have no problems with the init scripts now because I would just be used to them.

The main reason I went back to Gentoo from Slackware was because of portage. Its just an awesome package management system.

What issues were you having with the startup scripts exactly? Were you writing your own scripts?

gentoo is kind of bsd for linux, if you want to use it you have to adapt to it, the distro won't adapt to your particular needs. The documentation is good and if it doesn't fit you, you can look at freebsd docs, it is almost the same only the names and few linux specific stuff.

portage is ok but you still have something called swaret on slack. it is not very great for me compared to apt, but it does the job. Like J.W, if your os works that's the only matter!

if you still want gentoo, read carefully and TAKE YOUR TIME, it is not difficult to get it working and to understand it... If you play to much without reading you know what i mean, you can get your system very unstable :-) hope it won't happen.

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Was I helpfull? Affero!

it is always funny to me to see affero me or someting like that, maybe i am not use too see it in forums i visit.

Thank you, J.W.. I agree with you totally and no offense taken. I backed up the entire slack hard drive and yanked it from the box just incase, but I'm giving gentoo a try yet again...I'm at post-stage3 configuration right now so I should have a problem posted here soon once I'm booted No it wasn't a custom script that gave me trouble last time. I typed exactly what the docs told me to type in order to start my network on boot, yet it did not start with no logging as to why it didn't, yet manually running the script worked just fine. What is the BSD-style equivalent to SysV's /etc/rc.d/rc.local ? Yep, Slackware works just great, and I agree with that old saying, but I also feel that newer is sometimes better, otherwise my 200mhz router would be used as my primary PC besides, Patrick announced the other day he is retiring Slackware and that the next release will be the final...although there are many other branches of Slack, and I'm sure someone else will pick up where he left off.

What script are you talking about exactly? /etc/init.d/net.eth0 maybe?

Yes. "/etc/runlevels/default/net.eth0 start" worked fine manually though. I am almost there to see if I have the same problem again....had to start over from stage1 a second time because I stupidly disabled PAM in my USE flags prohibiting me from logging in as root or user on boot. The other main problem I had the last times I used gentoo was that emu10k1 (Sound Blaster driver) was not loading on boot. It was in my modules autoload file but gave an error...I forgot the exact message. I was able to fix it by moving to 2.6, but 2.6 had some noticable speed problems, so I'd like to get that working on 2.4 this time. I'll post more information in a little while. Thanks a lot.

well, all my modules load correctly on boot (after a lot of tinkering), but for some reason the is a small "pop" sound after any sound is played. I am using ALSA with the snd-emu10k1 driver, but ALSA says it's using OSS emulation too...maybe that could be the problem? If so how would I disable OSS emulation...or is it needed?

Hey Axion,

Have you looked at this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ALSA_sound_mixer_aka_dmix

Hopefuly that will work, and do me a favor and re-do the 'rc-update add net.eth0 default' step to make sure it works.

Thanks

BH

The 'other day' being April 1st?

And Slackware uses what are called BSD-style init scripts. Most other distros use SysV, which are the ones with zillions of subdirs and symlinks instead of a few simple files.

And LFS is as good as you make it. There are a lot of 'recipe' analogies in LFS and, as I understand, no great chef sticks to the cookbook religiously. Even I made it use LILO, BSD-style scripts, etc., and I'm a frigging awful chef.