“I’ve recently installed both Gentoo 1.4 and Mandrake 9.0 (both bleeding edge distros). I’m not going to talk about the installation so much as the niceness factor. The niceness factor in my opinion is after doing a default install, how nice is it to use. Gentoo 1.4 hasn’t been released yet, so things may change.” Read the mini-review at NewsForge. The pluses for Mandrake installation are its speed and the absolute ease of obtaining and applying updates. It completely obliterates the Windows contenders in both the update category and the installation of attached devices. Read that article at LinuxWorld.
Gentoo 1.4 Vs Mandrake 9.0 and Mandrake 9.0 Installation
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Portage is a phenomenally powerful system. Nothing else makes abusing your system with pre-alpha packages so easy
Making your own ebuilds is trivially easy (far easier than making new packages). Most of the time, it’s just a matter of copying an exisiting one and changing some source location and version strings. On top of this, the Gentoo community is great. The forums are very active, and ebuilds for experimental stuff is posted quite often. A testament to Gentoo’s suitability for the hacker user is my current system. I’m running a KDE RC on a Qt beta, along with GNOME 2.1.1 (devel release), beta versions of Mozilla, etc. All of this was done within portage. Most of it had ebuilds in Portage, and the rest had ebuilds on the internet. What really blew me away was that the ebuilds for the NVIDIA drivers (which don’t support kernel 2.5) automatically detected I was running a development kernel and patched the sources accordingly! Sheer lunacy!
I thought that Mandrake was for new users and Gentoo for experienced users?
The last Gentoo install I did was easier than the last Mandrake install I did though. The Gentoo manuals are very good.
I will have to agree with Z_God. You can’t compare Gentoo with Mandrake. An online friend asked me to write such a comparison a few months ago for OSNews, and I declined the offer saying that there is not much point comparing apples and oranges and I still stay on this opinion.
Pointless mini-review really, conclusion wise and review wise. But as stated above, comparing apples and oranges in in this fashion leaves much to desire, and are better left alone.
one question about Gentoo, is there any way i can install it without broadband?
as people have already pointed out, this is like comparing apples and oranges. i’ll skip that part. this might have been the worst review i have ever read, content-wise. he might has well have just said “linux is good” with a funny smile. no opinions were really stated or reinforced. i almost feel worse for having read it. someone please point that guy to a few reviews so he can take notes!
Maybe I’m exposing my ignorance, but… Everybody seems to say the Mandrake is a good distro for newbies and Gentoo, Debian, SUSE, etc, are for the Power Users.
Other than different updating schemes, when you get “under the hood” of the distribution isn’t it basically the same?
If I compile some source code on a Debian system don’t I get the same functionality as I would if I compiled the same code on a Mandrake system?
I’ve been using Mandrake for about a year and while I don’t consider myself a newbie, I’m not a Power User either. Have I been “missing out” on something by staying with Mandrake?
I think it was more of apples and pumpkins with the conclusion being that both apple pie and pumpkin pie are good with desert
Wow.. it obliterated Windows in the “installation of attached devices” then? I wonder if automount finally works – and they still don’t have hot-plug USB yet do they? Hell, I wasn’t even aware that there were Linux drivers for most of the devices I’ve got. Power management for my laptop still isn’t available, and the Mandrake apt/RPM bastard-child is hardly comparable to Windows install methods.. unless one happens to enjoy digging through the system by hand looking for those lost dependency packages when RPM failed, and wondering why they aren’t in the right places after all?
Um, let me give you a tip. There is this little thing called a “coherent sentence.” Learn it. Use it. I read your post 3 times, and I still only have a vague idea what you’re talking about. But to respond to some of your questions:
1) Automount has worked forever. Perhaps you mean supermount? Supermount is not standard in the kernel and probably never will be. Too many security risks, apparently.
2) Hot-plug USB is available. I know kernel 2.4 will automatically detect when you plug in a USB device. The other day, I plugged in my USB mouse and X detected it without a restart, just like XP.
3) Linux power management is pretty good, including both APM and ACPI. What model laptop do you have?
4) I have no clue why Mandrake makes life difficult for users. Just adopt Apt4RPM and get on with life!
I don’t understand Joe Barr’s installation chart. That Sony laptop he uses must have hamsters on a treadmill – how could it possibly take over two hours to install XP?
Well, Gentoo and Mandrake have slightly different target audiences …
Are we comparing apples and apples? Yeah, sure both distributions are Linux, but that is about the only similarity. You could just as easily compare how it is so much easier to buy a car pre-built instead of building it yourself, obvious.
OMG, typing in mount /mnt/foo is so hard I almost developed RSI. When I am in KDE, double clickon on the device icon is so hard I almost developed OOS. Please some one, stop making linux so *hard* to use!
(btw. I was being sarcastic)
..support is not “pretty good”.
No distro offers it out of the box. No distro offers it without a kernel rebuild. There are no ACPI apps.
I’ve had my ACPI laptop coming on three years already. Support for this has been awfully slow, and there are plenty of mainstream motherboards that use it.. it’s not just a laptop thing.
Yep, that’s one of the most well-respected myths of the Linux community. Guess who invented it and comes up with it every time there’s a distro discussion *g*.
In fact, differences between distros are marginal once you’ve got the system up and running. It’s not which distro you use but what do you do _with_ the system (BTW, the same goes for OSs in general). But try to tell that to the Debian/Gentoo ‘elitists’ …
monty
Montanus, that’s not quite true. Different distros put their config files in different places. The GUI configuration programs are different, with some distros having very unstable ones and other distros having decent ones. The kernel setup that comes out of the box might be different, etc.
it included windows updates, and I think it might have included office installation, I’d have to go back and re-read the article on the xp install.
Guys, guys! What are all these useless discussions? Just use the ONLY real distro. The distro that seperates the man from the boys. –>Debian<–
Btw. if you haven’t figured it out yet: I am joking.
Isn’t this just a waste of valuable time? Some guy said (I’m not calling names) comparing Gentoo with Mandrake is like comparing apples with oranges. That is so much BS!!! If you know Linux, there is no distro that cant get (whatever) job you want done! (ask Linus ;-)) And even if it was like “apples and oranges” it’s STIL a matter of taste. I like apples AND oranges (not that I am claiming anyone said one distro is better than the other). Hell, if you are “really” good you can even build Mandrake from scratch. Face it, even the “bad” RPM is catching up apt-RPM, etc. Maybe they should make 1 Linux distro to end all this suffering. -Supreme Linux- The mother of all distro’s.
My point: Distro’s come and go, but Linux is going to stick around.
May the Source be with you!