everything looks good, and even though emerge may seem intimidating now, beleive me it is the best thing since sliced bread. You will love it forever.
emerge is not the thing to be scared of by the way etc-update is. running emerge is easy but updating you /etc files, without breakage, is the part that required a bit of knowledge.
as for you original questions
Quote:
1)software installation
2)maintainance
3)uninstallation
4)Cleaning up old downloaded files..
5) [ARCH or ~ARCH ] ?????
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1. - emrge all the way, I'd even go so far as to say that if you need a package that isn;t in portage that it is probably worth trying to build your own ebuild file to suit (ok maybe that needs to wait a while).
2. the beauty of gentoo, maintenance = emerge rsync && emerge -Up world
oh and of cource that slightly more scary etc-update
3. uninstall = emerge unmerge <package> - thats all folks
4. ahh well this happens automatically to some extent but if you are running short of space you can delete anything in /usr/portage/distfiles you like. If you re-emerge it later it will simply download it again if needed.
5. probably best to stick to arch at the moment. I use arch myself and use USE=~ARCH emerge <package> for the few that I need the latest for. Best of both worlds.
Another thing I would recommend is to subscribe to the Gentoo newsletter. Loads of good info in there - also check the gentoo forums, again lots of useful info - although if you have a question there is bound to be someone here with an answer as well :-)
I have tried most of the major distros - red hat, mandrake, suse, debian, slackware and a couple of the minor ones as well but I have never felt that religous fervor than I do towards gentoo - it is the best distro I have come across. (I have been using linux since about '94 too so it's not like I tried all those distros last wekk and made my mind up)
Anyway have fun, there is a steeper learning curve than most other distro's but it is worth the effort.
rich
