From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lists.gentoo.org ([140.105.134.102] helo=robin.gentoo.org) by nuthatch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.54) id 1ErzjB-00069O-Vx for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:30:06 +0000 Received: from robin.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with SMTP id jBTFRkFu004735; Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:27:46 GMT Received: from ppsw-0.csi.cam.ac.uk (ppsw-0.csi.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.130]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.5/8.13.5) with ESMTP id jBTFPaN0003051 for ; Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:25:36 GMT X-Cam-SpamDetails: Not scanned X-Cam-AntiVirus: No virus found X-Cam-ScannerInfo: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/scanner/ Received: from student.cusu.cam.ac.uk ([131.111.179.82]:36415 helo=[127.0.0.1]) by ppsw-0.csi.cam.ac.uk (ppsw.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.130]:25) with esmtp id 1Erzef-0007WA-1J (Exim 4.54) for gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org (return-path ); Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:25:25 +0000 Message-ID: <43B3FFCA.2020105@hermes.cam.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:24:58 +0000 From: Richard Neill Organization: Trinity College User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.11) Gecko/20050729 X-Accept-Language: en-gb, en-us Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-user@gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org Subject: [gentoo-user] A few (gentoo-newbie) questions (mainly about binary packages) References: <1135815639.43b32bd72d574@webmail.ntplx.net> <1135816209.43b32e119b8f7@webmail.ntplx.net> In-Reply-To: <1135816209.43b32e119b8f7@webmail.ntplx.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: e2b093fd-b7a9-40c4-b890-2e70c7d6d69b X-Archives-Hash: c187807a550d7c271fa7765b5c922d98 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 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list