Linux.com

Disclaimer: I'm a gentoo user. I enjoyed your review, but do take issue with some points.

Some even say that it makes a good server, too.

Perhaps, as you don't end up with packages that aren't used. MOST gentoo installations do feature compilers (go figure for a mostly sourced-based distro). There are some who wouldn't want to have these tools on their server. Yes, they can compile on some other machine & install binaries. But why not just use (for example) Slackware?

Searching for packages is as easy as using the -s flag with the emerge command, and updating is just as simple.

-s to search titles, -S to search descriptions. Also check out esearch, which compiles a database of the programs in portage & allows for much faster searching (though it does take a lot of time to generate the database in the first place).

With a binary Linux distribution the kernel doesn't matter all that much to most users, but Gentoo Linux becomes a whole different operating system when you use the 2.4 kernel as opposed to the newer 2.6 tree.

Nonsense--binary users worry about hardware compatibility and an improved scheduler too.

<TT>emerge X.org</TT>

Minor point, but you typset this as code & you'd really want to:

<TT>emerge xorg-x11</TT>

You can emerge several programs at once if you like, but make sure that they don't have common packages that will try to compile at once -- both compiles will fail and you'll have to restart the emerge process. If you're smart about emerging, you can have four or five virtual terminals compiling different programs at once without any problems.

For single processor machines, you won't always gain that much to do serial compilations. It is probably better to perform parallel emerges, which also solves problems if they have the same or blocking dependencies. Just 'emerge xorg-xll mutt vim' for example. Use ccache to speed up subsequent compiles & possibly '-pipe' as a CFLAG to speed up current installs.

Updating is as easy as typing emerge sync and then emerge -u world.

I prefer to:

<TT>emerge -upvD world</TT>

to see what I'm getting first. Having the -D flag helps with failed upgrades, as it upgrades dependencies too (some ebuild authors don't always check for the minimum version needed for a dependency, especially with mixed stable (e.g. 'x86') and unstable (e.g. '~x86') packages.

Gentoo Linux development seems to be moving very slowly

I suspect that this is partly because upgrades are so easy--you can install it once & just use portage to get the latest version. Thus, portage is improved & the installation process not-so-much.

Even doing a stage 3 install takes a little too long -- the process could be mostly automated by using the simplest of Bash scripts.

I think the philosophy is to have the freedom to choose. So they don't want to offer simple shell scripts that make choices for you. Because the scripts could be trivial, you can write them or get them from the forums if you want non-interactive deployment.

The 2.4 kernel is a horrible choice for Gentoo

But 2.6 kernels are included on the 2004.2 disc (2.6.7), and in both the stable and unstable branches of portage (both 2.6.8). 2.6.5 was even included in 2004.1. Once again, the choice is yours.

Please don't make too much of my minor criticism--this was, overall, a worthwhile review.

#