On Thu, 2003-10-23 at 18:31, Theresa Chen wrote: > (getting ready to take cover) > I've been a hardcore Gentoo user for the last few months. A number of my > friends run Debian. So I am essentially spoiled by the apt and emerge > installs that does everything for you. However, I work in Systems for the > CS dept and we've used Redhat for a long time. I just got fed up with the > package installs and the stupid RHN surveys and the updating of 300 > some linux machines individually that eventually embarked on an online > search for the golden "rpm emerge". :) As a user? I'm just a regular > student lucky enough to have found this relic for an otherwise difficult > distro... A couple of things confuse me about gentoo. I've never understood what benefit they claim to be getting from building everything. I've read the 'compiled for your architecture' claims and that's just crap from all the technical responses and information I've read on it. Additionally, if you are building everything then none of your systems will really ever match. So if one gets cracked you'll not be able to use an md5sum to see if a binary has been switched out on you. That seems kinda sketchy to me. The final thing is that I've heard of nothing from gentoo or debian (FAI doesn't cut it thus far) like kickstart. This is one of the major things that has kept me from looking at other distros. I _REQUIRE_ kickstart to do my job, it's amazing how much time I'd waste if I had to touch a machine, at all, to do an install. So not much to take cover from - I've just not found that gentoo actually offers anything over red hat's distribution of linux. -sv
