Gentoo: Installing / Administering on Multiple Machines

[pardsbane at offthehill.org (Joshua Pollak)]

On Feb 11, 2004, at 7:19 PM, nmeyers at javalinux.net wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 12:12:21AM +0000, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 04:19:05PM -0500, Joshua Pollak wrote:
>>> Hello, I've been running Gentoo on a personal basis for a very long
>>> time, but I've never used it at work. I would like to propose its use
>>> here at my company to replace our RedHat 9.0 machines.
>
> Why?
>
> I run Gentoo on my boxes, but I like living on the bleeding edge. If
> your company likes support and stability, it's much better off with RH
> than Gentoo.

My company is stingy, we haven't been paying for support up till now, 
so I'm going to try and convince them to either by a copy of our chosen 
distro for each machine we run it on, or to use a free distro.

As for Bleeding edge vs. stability, I hate how RedHat hacks and 
modifies packages. I can't figure out a rational, easy way to roll out 
KDE 3.2 on our RH9.0 boxes (Fedora's packages don't work, and konstruct 
freaks out). While gentoo is riskier than RH, I think the large 
upgrades will be easier. I mean, upgrading to a new major package 
release with Gentoo is often far less headache than a similar upgrade 
for RedHat. KDE for example: emerge kde vs. who knows what, I haven't 
gotten it to work.

I think the rate of wipe-and-reinstalls would be drastically lower with 
Gentoo, and thats sort of what I'm going for.

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