Re: [gentoo-dev] GLI Officially Deprecated

[Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net>]

090114 Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 15:23 Wed 14 Jan 2009, Ben de Groot wrote:
>> Also, will we have an announcement on the www.gentoo.org frontpage?
>> This seems to me an important enough issue to inform our users about.
> Yeah, I'll get something up. I've got a few pending now.

I've been using Gentoo since 2003 & have installed it in  2  machines.
I've also felt it necessary more than once to comment in LWN
in response to scare stories then circulating about "the death of Gentoo"
& how it was no longer putting out new versions reliably or on time.
The fact that 'version' doesn't mean the same for Gentoo as other distros
is not clear to the many people who haven't used Gentoo.

I just had a look at the Gentoo home page,
as if I were a newcomer wanting to find out how to get started.
The 'about' page says nothing about the basic installation process,
so I went to 'installation docs', where the 1st 'installation resource'
is the 'Gentoo Handbook', which led me to get 'Gentoo AMD64 Handbook',
then 'about the Gentoo Linux installation'.
This emphasises that I can install Gentoo in many ways,
the 1st of which listed is 'from one of our installation CDs'.

May I suggest that the 'about' page needs an additional 3rd section
entitled 'How do I go about installing Gentoo ?'.
I'm sure DB is capable of writing whatever is needed,
but it could be something like the following:

  Unlike most distributions, which rely on binary packages
  and create a new version of the whole system at regular intervals,
  Gentoo is installed once and thereafter kept upto-date by the user
  by means of Portage (as above).  Installing Gentoo is not difficult,
  but it does require a bit more time & attention from the user,
  which we at Gentoo consider to be a useful exercise for her or him
  to get to know better how a Linux system really works under the hood.
  All you typically need is a live CD and a copy of the Gentoo Handbook,
  which you can find by following the link to 'installation docs' above.

It might be an idea also to amend the line in the Handbook above,
so that 'one of our installation CDs' is not quite so prominent.

HTH

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