Gentoo linux

I've been playing around with a new Linux distro called Gentoo Linux. What makes this different from the rest is that it's a source-based distribution, meaning that everything is compiled off source code (as opposed to installing binaries), and compiled with CPU optimization that you specify. I have my make.conf file set to build using 686 optimizations, which means binaries that will be compiled will work with P6 instruction sets and only run on P6+ systems (compared to RedHat which installs binaries that can run on 386 systems).

It's a bit tedious to set up, as you first start off by bootstrapping the system (stage 1) which downloads and builds the necessary compilers, libraries and utilities needed to complete the rest of the install. This took about 100 minutes. Next is stage 2, where the rest of the base system is downloaded and built. This took about 2 hours to complete. Last is stage 3, where you download and compile the latest kernel. Gentoo downloads 2.4.18 and adds a 2.4.19 patch to it, so this is bleeding edge stuff here. The kernel compile was extremely fast, compared to my kernel compiles on my RedHat systems, probably because I only compiled in the minimum amount of modules that I needed. This took about 15 minutes (compared to 60 minutes to finish compiling my RedHat kernel).

There's a few more things to set up (installing log daemon, setting up GRUB, setting up network files) and after that you have a working Linux operating system. Another great feature of Gentoo is its Portage system. Think of it as Gentoo's version of Debian's apt-get, only that the packages installed are always the most recent versions (as opposed to Debian which takes fscking forever to get the newest components installed into its distro – hell, the upcoming Debian stable release is still going to ship with kernel 2.2!).

So with my barebones Gentoo install, I wanted to try out the new KDE 3, so all I needed to do was enter "emerge kde." From there, the Portage system calculates any dependencies needed to get KDE running and downloads and installs those as well. This took about 7 hours to complete, as it had to download and compile XFree, QT, and some other programs in addition to KDE. I left this on overnight to finish.

So I've been playing around with this OS and it's definitely been a learning experience. Building all these things from scratch makes you really appreciate the little things the RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake installers do for you. If all goes well, I might switch my server over to Gentoo and maybe even my desktop system.