gentoo

nadir

I was just wondering if anyone here had managed to put gentoo on a mac yet? If so how well does it perform? was it difficult to do? and basically any other info that comes to mind. Its something I might consider doing when i get my next pc if it's actually worth it.

JustHalf

Gentoo is crap.

lotas

im using gentoo on my dual athlon pc and it works cool. only thing is you need broad band, and proper broad band, not like that eircom crap. i installed it about 2 months ago and i think i downloaded over 6 gb of sources. its faster then redhat in certin things, and its pretty cool. havent gotten it working on my mac yet. probably wont for a while. cool distro though. JustHalf, why do you think its crap?

JustHalf

I've been using it for about 7 months. The core portage system has been upgraded many, many times.

Fair enough. Maybe this was necessary. But in that time, portage seems to have become backwards-incompatible. I'm getting stupid errors where portage seems to expect some features to be there that wouldn't be in an "ancient" system like mine.

As I can't trust portage, the main pulling point of Gentoo, to work well in the future, I can't trust Gentoo to provide me with a solid system.

My system was build from scratch from a 1.4RC3 LiveCD (stage one). It's a P4 system optimised for PIII processors (due to a bug in GCC, which may have since been fixed).

lotas

i installed my copy of gentoo off a 1.4 cd. i did move from 1.4rc1 onwards (4 rcs to the full) and each portage update is just updated as standard. an emerge world -u usually fixes all the new packages. im well happy with it cause of all the extras.

joePC

Gentoo: I heard alot of good things so I decided to istall from stage3 just to see.....

Not very impressed to much updating, Im using mandrake 9.2 and loving it........

lotas

it depends on what you use it for. i had it on a server for ages and it ran grand. updates for security patches and stuff came in very quick (sometimes 20min after the thing had been discovered there was an ebuild on the forums or mailing lists). i have it on my workstation and it runs fast there. started from stage 1 and havent looked back in a while! talks to my windows box, linux box, mac and everything else for that matter, all nativally in most cases (smb for windows, nfs for linux, apple talk for the mac). i have been using linux for about 4 years now, and gentoo is the most customizable, stable, and fastest build i have found. i know it takes a while to get up and running, but its now supporting all my hardware. it just rocks!

nadir

interesting that people are having problems with it, cause ive installed it on 3 very different machines now, my own P4 (nvidia geforce4)(usb2 .etc), a sony vaio (rage mobility)(firewire external hard disk), and a dual nomad P3 (scsi) (ati, all in wonder). I got full hardware support working on all machines, and never once had a problem worth talking about. I have to say i really think its as good a distro as Debian, and I cant imagine how somone thinks mandrake is better, but i guess everyone to their own. What I really wanted to know tho is how it fares on a mac, or other radically different hardware, xbox .etc

lotas

from what i heard, it rocks on the G5. it builds KDE in half an hour! heard that some where on the gentoo fourms. as for anything else, im not sure. it does work on the mac, and the forums are there if theres problems. i cant see why it wouldent work, and how it would be majorly different to any other architecture. check the packages.gentoo.org page for lists of packages. they tell you what ones work with what platforms.