I have to state up-front that I've never used gentoo, so take the
following in
the context of questions (I guess I'm sort of playing devils advocate)
rather
than the basis for a religious war or flame bait.
Will do. 
Many people I've talked to that use gentoo think its a great distro.
However,
I've also been told by quite a few that it is not the best choice for
someone
who is not familiar with the GNU Linux/Unix way of doing things (i.e.
someone
who has only been exposed to Windows). All of those I've spoken to have
come
from either other GNU Linux distros to gentoo or are from a Unix
background.
From personal eexperience introducing windows users to GNU Linux, I know
that
one of the most alien concepts they have trouble with is building from
sources,
dealing with makefiles etc. Therefore, I wonder if gentoo is really the
best
way to start compared to distros like Ubuntu, Debian or even Red Hat?
There are
a lot of quite subtle issues which anyone with some epxerience on Linux
tends
to be across, but for the uninitiated, they can be very confusing.
Okay, Gentoo is more complicated than Mandrake, Fedora/RH, etc., in some
ways. My Linux background starts out back when I got my first domain and
hosted with a friend of mine. The account had shell access and I used to
hang out in Pine to check my email when I was at work. When I'd go visit my
friend in Austin who owned the hosting company and worked from home, I'd sit
behind her and watch what she was doing and pick up on some things and ask
questions. I eventually dual booted into RedHat (before Fedora) and would
do stuff here and there, mainly from a user perspective. Believe it or not,
building from sources really isn't that complicated. In Gentoo, you also
have a package management system known as emerge... if I want to install
Ruby on my system, for example, I'll click on my little Terminal icon, type
su to log in as root, enter the root password, and then type 'emerge --ask
--verbose ruby' (you can type this as emerge -av ruby in shorthand). It'll
then query the source server and tell me what it needs to install, including
any dependencies. If I type 'y' to install, it'll start installing.
Sometimes you do get some errors, and that's where Google comes into play.
(probably more info than you wanted.) As for building from source, normally
you just download the tar.gz file, get in as root at a console, and type tar
xfv source_file_name and it'll create the directories.... it's usually as
simple as going into the necessary directory and typing a few commands.
As for which distro to start out with, I probably would've thrown my hands
up in desperation if I started out with Gentoo. I used Mandrake for a few
months, felt I wasn't learning anything, then went to Fedora for quite a
while, and while I was learning some, I didn't feel that I was learning as
much as I wanted to, that and the fact that the last release I installed
didn't work nicely with my ATI card and I got sick of messing with it, and
in an impulsive moment, started my Gentoo experience. Now, mind you, the
first month or so of my Gentoo move, I rebuilt my system about 4 or 5 times,
because I screwed things up. LOL. But, I haven't needed to do that since,
and even though I've screwed things up, I've been able to fix the things
that went nutty.
Another release that is supposed to be more ''user friendly' is Sabayon.
It's based on Gentoo and has a lot of cool features preinstalled.
http://www.sabayonlinux.org They have a Live CD or DVD download, and you
can install off the DVD/CD, as well. Tons of packages are included. Most
everything someone new would probably need.
In short, my advice to a newbie with no Linux/Unix experience whatsoever, is
to go with a distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, or possibly Sabayon, use
it for a few months, and then when you feel daring, make the plunge to
Gentoo if you so desire.
Again, I apologize for my verbosity.
···
On 2/10/07, Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null> wrote:
--
Samantha
"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all
things are at risk."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson