Another Opinion Among Many

Now, I’ve got an operating system installed on my jumble of spare parts that has become a computer of sorts (still need a sound card and way more RAM).  Its running Gentoo Linux.  Are you surprised? I didn’t even try to do the Windows thing (as that would require another licence, right?…).  Now I tried Ubuntu, which ran but was a tad slow.  And, I’ve never really gotten used to Gnome as an interface.  It doesn’t do what I want it to do in a reasonable and ergonomic way.  I think that its the tools, as the concept is solid.  The Damn Small Linux latest live CD seemed to work, but I’ve never really gotten used to the VESA X-Server that it uses and trying to make it into a reasonable Debian system with the necessary unsupported packages to make my computer fun, was just looking like too much work.

Kubuntu was just too overloaded for 128MB RAM and it wasn’t going to install.  It should have a reduced, low RAM version of the installer so that it can be installed on lesser systems.  What happened to the OS that actually installed on a P-III?

So, I was brought full circle back to Gentoo.  I’ve not had this wonderful and frustrating OS installed on my computer for a long time (nearly a year, I think).  The thing is that, even with the new graphical installer from a Live-CD (while surfing the net with memory-hog Firefox), I had a full Gnome desktop (yes, I said Gnome) within a few hours.  I’ve removed most of the remnants and replaced with KDE, but I’m still finding cool apps every day.  Emerging ccache and using it to cache some of the gcc compilation seems to have speeded up the compilation by a lot, as well.

I used the 2006.1 Live CD to install and I must say that its getting to be a good tool if you want to do a graphical installation, or run from a Live CD, like many other good “working” distros, like SimplyMepis or PCLinuxOS.  If I get to it, I’ll fill this post with a pile of links, for those who are too lazy to use Google or Yahoo! search.