Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo Badges

["Walter Dnes" <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>]

On Thu, Aug 04, 2005 at 09:27:58AM -0500, Michael Sullivan wrote

> My first Linux was Red Hat 8.0.  I then went to RH 9.0 and Fedora
> Core 1.  I for one would not recommend Gentoo to a person who has
> never used Linux before.  I certainly wouldn't have understood it.

  What he said.  Around 1997 spam started getting really bad and my ISP
offered users a spam filter.  The user interface was actually a
front-end to a procmail configurator.  I dove in and started manually
configuring procmail from the commandline.  I had always been a
command-line-commando in DOS, and I picked up the unix commandline
reasonably quickly.  In September 1999, I bought a Dell with Win98SE
with 128 megs RAM and 450 mhz cpu (that's my current emergency backup
machine).  That left me with the old Pentium-Pro 120 mhz machine with 32
megs of RAM that originally came with Win95.

  My experimenting with procmail was eating into my 30 hours per month
dialup account.  People on the procmail mailing list mentioned that they
were running procmail on linux.  I picked up a remaindered copy of a
Redhat linux 5.2 book with CDs (6.2 was released April 2000) and
installed it on my old clunker.  Initially, I used it for screwing
around with procmail filters, but I also discovered linux had Netscape
4, and various email and news readers, plus primitive word processing
and spreadsheets.  I got another machine (433 mhz, 128 megs RAM white
box) strictly for linux, and went online with Redhat 6.2 or 6.3.  I
slowly spent more and more time with the linux machine and less with the
Windows machine, until I eventually decided to reformat the Windows
machine and install Redhat linux on it as well.

  I played around with a few other distros, but always went back to
Redhat.  I did try CRUX, where I first learned "make menuconfig" and
chrooting for install, etc.  About that time, I found Mozilla 0.95
painfully slow on my old 433 and 450 mhz machines.  That's when I first
experimented with custom builds from tarballs.  "-O2 -march=i686"
speeded up Mozilla.  I also found out "the hard way" that -O3 and
various extra unrolling options were "not a good thing".

  Redhat 7.3 was probably the best end-user distro of its time.  Redhat
announced they were dropping support as of end of 2003.  I switched to
Debian in fall of 2003, where I stayed until summer of 2004.  I had
grown tired of Redhat's constant upgrade treadmill, so at first I loved
Debian's lack thereof.  However, it bit me in the late summer of 2004
when the latest Firefox and Realplayer versions refused to install, due
to Debian's ancient gtk libs, or whatever.  I switched back to CRUX,
which was more uptodate, and also assumed "-O2 -march=i686" rather than
i386.

  Because my old Dell needed all the help it could get, I was always
asking about more optimization.  People suggested that if I really
wanted more optimization, I should switch to Gentoo.  Approx the end of
2004 I did exactly that.

  Even with that background, my transition to Gentoo wasn't 100% smooth.
If I had tried jumping from Windows direct to Gentoo, without 4+ years
of linux usage, I would've been lost.

> Think of it as a test of the strong:  Newbies might choose Gentoo and
> run into all kinds of problems and ask stupid questions.  Most will
> get frustrated and either leave Linux altogether or seek out a more
> user-friendly distrobution.  The ones who stick around are the
> ones worth adding to the community.

  There's a concept in emergency medical battlefield treatment called
triage.  Divide the wounded into 3 groups...

  1) Slight injuries; will recover fully even if you don't treat them.
  2) Moderate injuries; can recover fully, but only if you treat them.
  3) Mortally wounded; will die regardless of how much effort you put
     into treating them.

  The best use of resources is with the second group.  Similarly, we
might want to set up new-user list to help those people who come close
to being able to get going with Gentoo on their own, but have one or two
"showstopper" problems that are easily solvable by experienced users.
Maybe even some sort of "level 1 helpdesk" concept.  A mailing list
works only if you have internet connectivity and email both functioning.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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