Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Duane Malcolm <d.malcolm AT auckland.ac.nz>]

I tried Gentoo over a year ago, I gave up pretty quick. Mainly because 
summon and cast was done in series. This was bad for users like me who 
have a 56k modem. You'd hope that you can download programs while you 
compile a big program like xfree86.


Jaanus Heeringson wrote:
> So I'm at it again, burning the midnight oil.
>
> I have recently read a lot of different articles about Linux in general 
> to try and get a grip on the "feel" out there, and this is some things i 
> found out:
>
> 1. There is a confusion about choise of distro. At least more than there 
> was a few years ago, mostly due to the big ones starting to charge for 
> updates etc. People change distros often and simply can't make up their 
> minds. This is good for us, and we should take advantage of it.
> 2. Gentoo is big. It is almost allways mentioned alongside the other 
> large commercial distros. This is good since more people are interested 
> in sourcebased distros, and bad because we have a lot of work to do if 
> we want to make ourselves heard next to them.
> 3. A lot of the intermediate users are very tired of choise. They simply 
> don't want to research at every corner to install the appropriate stuff 
> (which MTA, DNS etc) and are asking for a "preferred setup". This maby 
> don't concern us yet, but it might in the future.
>
> I'm a bit interested in gentoo and how it differentiates from SMGL. I 
> have read in on it a bit, but don't currently have time to install it 
> now. What I have found so far does not seem very impressive, at least 
> not when it comes to the base system. This of cause is not enough, so I 
> need more input reguarding this issue. I'm sure there are a lot of you 
> out there that try Gentoo now and then, so could you please describe 
> your view of the differences between Gentoo and SMGL? What's good & bad? 
> What are the major differences?
>
> My gut feeling is that in order to get some attention we will have to 
> compete with Gentoo to get it, and since they actually are a for profit 
> company, it will be quite a task. In my opinion we need to find a couple 
> of point on how we differentiate us from Gentoo in a good way.