I have this love/hate relationship with Gentoo Linux. As mentioned previously, I’m installing Gentoo on a spare box to test and evaluate MythTV as a possible homebuilt PVR. Installing Gentoo is pretty easy (well, for an experience Linux user it is), however it is not pretty quick. In fact, it’s pretty long, pretty f**king long.
Gentoo is a great source-based Linux distribution, providing massive flexibility and customization by the end user, while still maintaining a semblance of order with it’s package management. The problem with source-basd distros is in their compile times. I’m currently running the install on an AMD Athlon 1.1GHz with 512MB of RAM and a pretty fast hard drive. I started emerging (Gentoo speak for compiling and installing) KDE and it’s dependencies last night at 8:45pm. It’s still going. In fact, it’s only about halfway through. Check the time stamp; that’s right, it’s been over 12 hours. I’m not even installing Xfree86. I’ve already done that, this is just KDE. ARGH!
Fortunately, compiling KDE is the longest piece of a Gentoo install you’ll ever do (unless you’re insane enough to compile OpenOffice from source, instead of using the binary package), and most users will only do it once. However, being the geek and tinkerer that I am, I’m constantly formating, rebuilding, and reinstalling my machines, so I do this quite often. Many times I’ve flirted with another binary distribution, but I always come back to Gentoo. RedHat, SuSE, and Mandrake are all too “packaged”. Debian is stale (but makes for a great server), and Slackware is, well, Slackware. Gentoo’s flexibility and non-reliance on GUI configuration editors is what draws me to it, and like the moth, I keep coming back, ready for more hurtin’!