Yesterday, or i should say this morning (since i chat with my friend at 1 AM in the morning) i talked with my friends via YM and we talked about Linux distributions that can be installed on a low spec PC. He wanted a small, flexible, and robust Linux distributions and avoided big distributions like RedHat, Fedora Core, SuSE, and Mandrake since it was a big distros. He needed X since he want to use Firefox and some web editing tools. The computer will not be connected to the Internet, so there are no security updates service available but it's ok for him, since he only tried to utilize his old computer.
Our discussion comes to Ubuntu Linux and also Gentoo. Gentoo is rather hard to install but it is fully configurable and also optimized for all purpose. It can be used as desktops, servers, graphical operations, or any other purpose. Gentoo don't use versioning on their products, since Gentoo's users can update their package using emerge command which will update their portage tree and update all their package to the lastest version.
On the other hands, Ubuntu Linux is a new Linux distribution and based on Debian. "Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". Some friends that have installed Ubuntu said that this distro is not intended for developers who don't have Internet connections since some development packages such as GCC is not installed by default and they have to download it from Internet manually.
I have downloaded all Gentoo documentation, starting from installation, portage, emerge, and kernel updates. It's very well documented and i'm happy with that. No other distro have such a great documentation (exception for those who sell commercial products, such as Mandrake, SuSE and Red Hat). In fact, Gentoo is a community based Linux distribution. This is what makes me happy when i realize this fact. I'm looking for the Gentoo's CD right now and hopefully i can try Gentoo as soon as possible (but maybe not in my computer since it is already full and it's too risky to sacrifise my Mandrake)
You can always install gcc afterwards.. :) Im using SuSE which is great to migrate from windows to linux, but i'll be trying ubuntu soon. Gentoo seems too nerd, command line too leet and i dont think that's the best way to attract people to using it, dont you agree?
ReplyDeleteYes, i have tried SuSE 9.0 once and it was great afterall, but i prefer to use Mandriva and Slackware for now :)
ReplyDeleteGentoo works if you have fast Internet Connection, which is not available in Indonesia :(
It's trully for geeks :)