Gentoo love / hate

I got a new laptop.. Yeah!

Part of the idea of this new laptop is to run a bunch of vmware sessions to do some multi-server development.  Lots of ram, fast CPU… now the challenge is getting the unix enviornment working.  I’ve been using gentoo at work for a while — also on my own personall server — it’s nice, but it’s a totally pain to setup.

Love: I can install just about any package and any version.  After spending a few years locked in Fedora and finding that I was constantly upgrading a package here and there, but the dependencies and other things constantly drove me up the wall.

Love: It’s linux — unix, etc.  It’s home.

Hate: The challenge is that you need to upgrade things about every six months just to make sure you’ve not drifted too far off the reservation (e.g. forcing a full install).

Hate: The installation isn’t quick and easy, you have to read a wiki and make lots of little configurations.