[gentoo-user] A few (gentoo-newbie) questions (mainly about binary packages)

[Richard Neill <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

Dear All,

I am a newbie here, and I wonder if I might ask you a few questions
about Gentoo. I've looked on the Gentoo website, but can't see answers
to all of these.

Basically, I've now used Mandrake/Mandriva for the last 4 years, and
become fairly proficient with it, but am considering that it is time to
move (Mdv is getting increasingly non-free, and is also less transparent
than it used to be; they also ignore bug reports!). Gentoo looks to me
to be the best alternative, and I have already made frequent use of the
excellent documentation eg on udev or dvd authoring. But before I jump
into the unknown, I wanted to ask a few things.

1)My main machine is a laptop, so it doesn't really have either the disk
space for sources or CPU power to compile everything
kernel,X,kde,openoffice ...). Is there a way to do a binary install that
will get me a fully working system within a few hours?  Of course I want
to learn gentoo "properly", but I'd prefer to do this from within a
working system!

2)How exactly do gentoo security updates work? Under Mdv, there is a
mailing list with announcements of which RPMs to install. If I have a
binary-based distribution, will it be possible to keep it current?

3)Is there a relatively stable fork of gentoo with less frequent
updates, or do I have to stay on the bleeding edge? Of course I want to
get eg the latest kernel, or firefox, but I ran Mandrake Cooker for a
while, with > 100MB of updates per day and all sorts of random breakage!

4)Does anyone know of a good resource for ex-mandriva users?

Thank you very much for your help,

Richard
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