About a month and a half ago I purchased a 2.8 GHz computer from an auction site to set up my website on. I’ve been playing with slow computer and hosting my own page for a few years now and I thought it was time to do something real, like get a computer that I could dedicate to my website and not have to dual-boot or any kind of voodoo. I needed something that I could set up and just let run.
I choose Gentoo for the operating system for a few reasons. The first was it’s rock solid stability. Another was the availability of documentation. If you can’t find the answer in the wiki documentation, then just hop on #gentoo on irc.freenode.net, ask your question and you’ll get answered in a matter of seconds. I lurk in the chat rooms just to see the knowledge move from one person to another.
Learning the nuts and bolts of Linux was a major reason for choosing Gentoo. Over the years, I have grown to know Redhat, WinLinux 2000 (showing my age), Slackware, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. Of them all, I can rate Fedora as the prettiest and Ubuntu as the easiest and Debian as the most educational. I really liked Debian because it allowed you to make choices about your system. Then I stumbled on Gentoo. Gentoo is all about choices. Gentoo is not for the faint of heart.
One of the most anxiety bearing tasks of installing Linux is the idea of having to configure, compile and install a kernel. All the distributions I named above, except Gentoo, avoid this task all together by building a generic kernel and having the system probe and load the correct modules for the kernel to work. Not Gentoo. One of the first tasks done in the installation of the system is configuring and compiling your kernel. Just the thought of working with the kernel kept me away from Gentoo for awhile.
With the purchase of this new hardware, I was determined to learn things the Gentoo way. After a couple of months time into researching Gentoo, I have to say that I find Gentoo more understandable, more versatile, more configurable, and simpler than any of the other Linuxes I have become accustomed to.
There are a few major areas to learn about Gentoo, and the rest comes easy. The first, is to download genkernel. This tool will configure the kernel, give you the option to customize it, compile and then install the kernel into the boot partition. If you are smart, you make a symlink to the kernel and you don’t even have to update grub.
Another major area was the USE flags, masked by keywords, and make.conf. Once you learn the the correct usage of these items, the rest of Gentoo is a piece of cake.
I like using my Palm T|X. I had my concerns about building the system as a Gentoo system, not because of the lack of capabilities, but because of my lack of understanding those capabilities. Evolution is the main email client and personal manager for the Gnome desktop. Evolution is supposed to sync with pdas much like Outlook and the Palm Desktop do in Windows. I was wondering what type of voodoo I would have to pull to get Evolution to sync up with my T|X in Gentoo, knowing the trouble I had in the versions of Fedora I had used in the past. I checked out the USE flags for Evolution and saw the “pda” use flag. I activated the flag, compiled and waited.
After it was compiled, I opened up Evolution and went to synchronization settings. I began to configure my pda and when it came to sync, I hit the hotsync button on my palm and almost fell out of my chair. It sync’d on the first try. I couldn’t believe it. I did it again. I set my conduit settings and have been syncing with Evolution ever since.
It’s nice when things work. If you are looking for an alternative OS that still works with your Palm, I suggest Gentoo. Gentoo takes a little reading to execute gracefully, and you may not get it to your liking the first time around. But, if you pay attention to what you are doing, Gentoo can be the friendliest version of Linux out there. Things just work.