As some of my loyal readers (whom I could probably count on a single hand) may remember - I switched my Linux box over to Gentoo a few months back. I was so enthralled over Gentoo that I decided to actually make a post on my site here about how it was literally the “second coming of christ”. Well okay maybe I am exaggerating…
Anyway like grains of sand through the hourglass the saga of Gentoo continues. The win2k server my roommate and I built from spare parts nearly two years ago finally crapped out. It started throwing blue screens once every 30 minutes and would only remain stable longer than that if it was booted into safe mode. I decided to replace that box with my Gentoo Linux machine (which was sitting in the corner of my room just serving out files).
The install went great. It took me a total of ten hours to install all of the required hardware and software on the new server. This included migrating the old data off the server as well as the harddisk. Note: The data had to be copied over the network since Linux and NTFS don’t play together well.
So the server is running rock solid stable - however the fun doesn’t end there. Two days ago I began to replace the YellowDog Linux install on my ibook with Gentoo as well. Since the ibook is a bit slower - I’m still in the process of compiling a few apps (namely mozilla) and tweaking the kernel a bit. However with the exception of the Power Management bugs in the current Gentoo kernel - things have gone exceptionally well on that front. Needless to say while Gentoo won’t be replacing MacOS X anytime soon - it’s usefulness cannot be denied. All in all I think its a real shame that the commercial Linux distributions can’t seem to achieve the same level of quality as some of the free ones.
J