[Discuss] Gentoo?

[Bernie C. Till]

Well, Drew, it seems that you and I are singing from the same page of the
same hymn book.

The three most important issues to me are security, security, security,
stability, and functionality.

The stakes are a lot higher when your server is connected to the internet
24/7 by a big fat pipe, as compared to a desktop client, which I physically
disconnect from the internet when I'm not actively using it.

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at vlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at vlug.org]On
Behalf Of Drew
Sent: January 26, 2014 2:58 PM
To: discuss at vlug.org
Subject: Re: [Discuss] Gentoo?


> Hi Bernie:
>
> <snip>. The
> fundamental point though remains which is that source distributions
> like Gentoo give users a degree of flexibility (such as trying
> different compiler optimizations or different compilers) they do not
> have with binary distributions.  The downside, of course, of a source
> distro is you do have to build (and rebuild whenever there is a source
> change) software packages.  I have never tried Gentoo (or any other
> source distribution) so I don't know whether that requirement is a big
> deal or not for today's very fast computers.

I think Alan, you really hit the strength of Gentoo on the head.

Flexibility is the main reason I went to Gentoo and stayed there
almost five years. I could chose to compil certain packages with the
options I wanted, not what a maintainer thought I needed. Good example
was Apache/PHP/MySQL which I kept stripped down as much as possible. I
felt that running those packages with just the features I wanted meant
less worry somebody could compromise the LAMP box by attacking a
feature I didn't know I had installed.

The downside of course is that you do have to compile everything from
scratch and that can take a while, even on a new machine. During
intial setup, it was not uncommon to fire off a series of packages and
come back 8hrs later after work or after I woke up in the morning.
Also, frustrating sometimes to run across a package that didn't play
nice and crashed the compile process midway through the 8hr run. :-(
CentOS by comparison I can get from boot CD to installed environment
in under an hour.

Which distro is best depends on what you need.


--
Drew

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
--Marie Curie

"This started out as a hobby and spun horribly out of control."
-Unknown
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