Perhaps a week and a half or so ago, I started playing around with Gentoo Linux. I really disliked it at first, just because of the amount of time involved in getting a basic system up and running. After spending some time with it, however, I’ve replaced Fedora Core 4 with Gentoo Linux 2005.1 on my Dell Inspiron 600m laptop.

It was a pain in the ass at first, as I had to compile a custom kernel (something I haven’t really bothered with for a while — for the last year or two, I’ve mostly stuck with the stock kernels on non-production servers and workstations), compile everything I wanted, set it all up manually, etc., but now that it’s up and running, I’m quite happy with it. I’ve still got a few things left to compile (OpenOffice is compiling now, and probably will be for quite a while), but for the most part it just works(tm).

I still have to figure out the way a few things work, but I know what I’m doing for the most part. I started using Linux around 1997 and FreeBSD around 1999, so I have a good idea of how things are done in Gentoo.

I really like portage (no big surprise since I always liked ports collection), though I don’t like the fact that Gentoo calls portage “…Gentoo’s most notable innovation in software management.” Sorry guys, you got it from FreeBSD, even right down to taking the location of downloaded files (/usr/ports/distfiles in FreeBSD) and basically doing a s/ports/portage/ on it to come up with /usr/portage/distfiles for Gentoo. Granted, some things are different, but it clearly came from BSD land.