Re: This was posted on Digg.com -- Linux Distribution blog/article

[Danny Sauer <sauer@cloudmaster.com>]

Bryan wrote regarding 'Re: This was posted on Digg.com -- Linux Distribution blog/article' on Fri, Dec 09 at 08:31:
> No installer.  No hardware detection.  Not anything that would be "re-
> installed" or "repackaged" on arbitrary hardware.  You have repeatedly
> made comparisons in such regards and I don't know how many times I have
> to say that Gentoo is _not_ for that before you'll give up those
> comparisons.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/

Graphical installer, able to install binary packages for a
gnome/OOo/firefox/thunderbird system as well as the LiveCD
kernel/initrd which does some basic hardware detection and an
Xorg.conf which works on a lot of hardware.  Available in variants
built for x86, ia64, and ppc64. :)

Just FYI.  Version 0.2 of the installer is in 2005.1, 0.1 was in
2005.0.  The Gentoo fan I work with says 0.2's fairly nice - it lets
him set up the bootstrap and package install of a new system in a
reasonable amount of time, rather than having to babysit the install
process for a full day or two.

As a related aside, I used Gentoo for about a year on several
production systems.  I had specific versions tagged, built binaries on
a single system for distribution to the other systems, etc.  It was a
bigger pain in the butt than just running a packaged distro and
building what I need (apache, postfix, php, sometimes mysql) in
/usr/local (apt's ability to mark files as "sure, the package
installed this, but then I changed it later, so please don't overwrite
it" is real handy there). :)  Gentoo desperately needs some damned
quality control, in the form of a "stable means more than 'works for
me'" stick applied to the heads of several of the package maintainers.
It does work well on my car's mp3 player, though, as the Gentoo folks
have a good system for building a very stripped-down structure which I
can then cramfs and copy to the flash card that the system boots from.
I've found that procedure more cumbersome with other distros.  So,
ports as implemented in Gentoo seem good for at least the embedded
thing, which I think was already established. :)

--Danny

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