Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo's advantage: 'optimized for your system' -- huh?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Joshua D Doll <joshua.doll@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I think the Handbook and other Official gentoo docs are well and written. I
>>> feel they are so well written and informative that a new user could read and
>>> follow what the doc is trying to convey.
>>>
>>>
>>> --Joshua Doll
>>
>> I agree. Everything except the grub part. It's well written but it
>> requires more knowledge about the actual hardware than the rest of it,
>> especially if you do it wrong and have to recover.
>
> I helped my brother install Ubuntu and the lack of control over grub
> was frustrating. It just did what it wanted to do without asking
> (which was install grub onto the wrong drive with the wrong drive
> numbers, because the BIOS boot order did not match Ubuntu's detected
> drive order). If that drive had been part of a RAID or had some
> important metadata in the boot sector, it could have been a disaster.
>
> No distro is perfect. Gentoo is perfect for me, though :)

I completely agree. I like the control also.

I only took a *very* small exception to Joshua's statement that a 'new
user' could read, follow it and understand what it's telling him/her
to do and then do it and come out with a working machine. I think it's
true if the new user builds exactly the 3 partition example shown in
the docs and does *only* the very basic install on a machine that
doesn't have Windows, etc. However I think that the docs (not the
software!) could be improved to handle things like dual-boot, either
another distro or windows, etc. which personally I think 'new users'
come up against. Issues about stuff like where to put the MBR, why and
why not to do that sort of thing, requires (or is vastly enhanced) if
that new user has some knowledge about hard drives, booting, etc.

- Mark