Review Gentoo Linux

Review

Distro: Gentoo Linux

Rating: Very good

Pros: Portage is very powerful, this a very customizable distribution, great community support, and works on most platforms

Cons: the installer can make you curl up in a ball and cry yourself to sleep.

If you've heard about this distribution it's probably fair to say that you already know about the install process. Unlike other distributions, Gentoo lacks a GUI installer, as a matter of fact the entire thing is done by command line. So all of you who are timid when dealing with the almighty cursor may want to try a more GUI friendly distribution like Mandriva or SuSe. Now to make up for its lack of GUI, the developers have a series of handbooks or install guides that take you step by step through the process of installing Gentoo on many different architectures including x86 and PPC. Gentoo's Installation Handbook also has a great deal of information on how to perform the installation along with some detailed examples. However, like all manuals there will usually be something you either can find in the handbook or just don't understand in which case its time to hit the Gentoo Forums. The forum is the home of the Gentoo Community in which may of its users and maintainers read and post problems and solutions they have with just about anything you'd want to do with your Gentoo system.

For the record Gentoo isn't that much faster than most distributions, believe me it's a little faster but nothing really dramatic. The thing is that the best thing Gentoo has going for it is Portage, that is the distributions package/software management system. It doesn't require any special files that are difficult to create *cough* rpm *cough* but does typically require commands to be executed by the command line. There are GUI programs that allow you to use Portage through an application but I have yet to find one that has an intuitive interface. The rest of this distro is pretty much on the level with Slackware and other distros. Bottom line is that if your a command line junky and want to get away from the world of dependency ridden binary packages then Gentoo may be the right distro for you.