Gentoo

I have placed a new article on my blog about my experiences with Gentoo, I am doing it in three parts, I hope to have them done over the next two weeks.

Memoirs of a Gentoo Junkie - Part I

I first heard the word Gentoo from a colleague of mine I met while I was doing a gig at Cingular, Chris Bravo. Chris is a very savvy developer and I learned quickly to trust his judgment during our time working together. When he told me to give Gentoo a try I took the plunge. I have not regretted my trust. The Gentoo system is by far the best distribution I have used. Keep in mind, my requirements may not be the same as yours. Through the course of this article I will point out where Gentoo meets my requirements.

Some History

Let me start by telling you about my history with Linux. I have been using linux since 1993 when I installed Slackware on my Northgate 25mhz 386. I did not have a PPP or SLIP connection to the internet back then so I downloaded the disk images at work and copied them on to floppies and took them home. I can't remember how many disks there were but I am certain it was over 20. Having fooled around with Minix and even installed on a floppy and booted it on one of my old 8086 computers, I was familiar with the process of bootstraping an operating system install. Slackware made it much easier but there were still some pretty hariy parts to the installation. That system still boots, I never throw anything away. I was still doing most of my development in Windows at the time so I mostly used it to fool around. Since then, I have installed several versions of RedHat, Mandrake, and Debian. One particularly good experience was with a RedHat derivative called ClarkConnect. I never could get Debian to work for me, but I don't blame the distro, I just did not have the patience to work around some network card issues.