[CALUG] Linux on a laptop

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Eric Bassett
<ebassett at tenablesecurity.com> wrote:
> If you know your hardware, you can always compile Gentoo on it from scratch.
>  It'll probably give you the best performance as well.  However, the
>  installation can be a daunting task which is why there's a meaty handbook to
>  follow.  I say give it a shot - you'll definitely look at things differently
>  after knocking out a Gentoo Stage 1 installation.

I don't think anyone does stage1 anymore -- start with stage 3.

That said, Gentoo is *great* if you want to figure out how things
actually work.  However, you should be ready for every 'emerge world'
to take a few hours of post-merge debugging.  Not every time mind you,
but occasionally things break.  This isn't a fault of Gentoo -- it's a
direct consequence of *not* following the "never upgrade anything"
strategy of most RedHat derivatives.  The problems are always
recoverable, but you do find yourself in "emergency carefully re-read
the docs" mode quite a lot.

I use Gentoo on all of my servers, and I'm very happy with it, but
sometimes the friends and family hosted on the servers aren't so happy
with a few hours' downtime when an Apache upgrade drops a module.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com