Windows vs Mac. Ford vs. Chevy. Blockbuster vs Netflix. It goes on and on. So, why not a Ubuntu vs Gentoo? I'm talking all out battle here. Which is better? Who will come out ahead?
I intend to find out what makes Gentoo tick, and why everyone I seem to meet tells me to use it. Frankly, I don't get it. I am a happy Ubuntu user. In fact, I prefer any Debian-based distro, including Debian itself. Why? Rock solid, and stable. And of course, apt. The single greatest package management system ever designed.
Anyway, I am interested in Gentoo, due to all the hype, and I would like to give it a try. I downloaded the 2006.0 LiveCD (the one with the graphical installer), and intend on installing it on a virtual machine. Now before all the hoopla comes out of the woodwork, the machine I am installing it on is a 2.8 Pentium 4, with 1GB DDR2 RAM and a 300 GB SATA2 7200RPM hard drive. When running the virtual machine, of course I will be giving all the system RAM and processing power to the virtual machine itself. I want to see the virtual machine run as native as I can, even though I know it is not 100% possible. If someone would like to donate their machine for a Gentoo installation, by all means, I will accept. Otherwise, a VM will just have to work. Speaking of which, this will be done at my place of employment, at which, I work on a Windows XP box.
Now, I have successfully installed Gentoo on a Sparc box about a year ago or so. It was a pain in the butt walking through the installer, and I don't plan on going through that again. I look forward to using the graphical installer provided by the 2006.0 LiveCD. Sorry if this isn't 1337 enough for you hardcore Gentoo users out there. I don't have time at work to spend 5 hours installing Gentoo. I have better things to do.
So with that, I look forward to playing around and getting to know the system fairly deeply. I consider myself a strong Linux user with advanced knowledge in many areas. So, over the course of the next few days, I guess I'll see what happens. At any rate, it should be interesting.
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