kerravonsen | The Building of Penguins (Reply)

Ah, I am weary. I have been installing GenToo. Which has been a learning experience: I learned that I shouldn't have wasted my time. As I had suspected all along, and suspected even more when the install documents had the implicit assumption that the user had a broadband connection: GenToo isn't worth it unless you do have a broadband connection. And a faster CPU and more memory. And that was installing it with the most precompiled stuff possible.

There are some nifty things about it, though. This weekend I have managed to progress far enough to have X and KDE running, to get my dialup connection to work (if I hadn't I would have tossed in the towel right there...) to get my soundcard working, and to be listening to my .ogg files with XMMS while typing this with logjam. I haven't yet tried to get printing or CD-burning working yet, and I may not bother. Not until I get an ADSL connection, anyway. But, as I was saying, niftyness. This is definitely a more under-the-hood distro than most, but at the same time, they actually give quite nice tools for it; it sort of feels more unified, more organized. Like, they tell you all about runlevels, and then give you a tool which makes adding and deleting services from runlevels a trivial exersize. Likewise, emerge itself has all the advantages of Debian's apt-get, but wait, there's more... The Debian apt-get is oriented towards installing binary packages. Only. While apt-get does enable you to download now and install later, with emerge, you can do that also, plus you can choose between binary packages and source ones (yes, there actually are binary packages...) and you can also do "emerge search" which with debian you have to do with 'dpkg -l' or apt-cache or some other tool. Granted, it is unfortunate that the GenToo packages only seem to have one-line descriptions, which isn't as good as the longer ones you get with Debian packages.

Alas, there does seem to be fewer GenToo packages than Debian ones. But that might not end up mattering so much, if it turns out that .ebuild scripts aren't that hard to write. I'm not sure at this point, I've only glanced at the man page. But there are inherent advantages, I think, with a source-base distribution. Source is the least likely to run into dependency hell, because most build scripts are flexible in what they require as prerequisites, wheras binaries tend to need the exact version they were compiled with, as well as being able to say, no, I don't need that optional extra, compile it with that option switched off, wheras a binary doesn't give you the option: the choice has already been made by the package builder. Another thing is, that source is always available in the Open-Source/Software-Libre world, it is the default, fallback method for every project, so if .ebuild scripts do turn out not to be that hard to write, it means that one doesn't have to wait and pray that some noble person decides to make a package for it for your favourite distro.

But... it is wearying to have to wait so long when you're installing things...