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Slackware / Gentoo Comparison

t0rek

Wilson's Friend
I'm using Slackware, but I was wondering that a lot of you guys use Gentoo, so I just wanna know, what are the advantages and disadvantages of them_ which one is easier to use? which one is better in your opinion and comments ans stuff like that...
 

Hacktarux

Emulator Developer
Moderator
t0rek said:
I'm using Slackware, but I was wondering that a lot of you guys use Gentoo, so I just wanna know, what are the advantages and disadvantages of them_ which one is easier to use? which one is better in your opinion and comments ans stuff like that...

http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml

That's gentoo philosophy and that's exactly why i chose it : The distribution doesn't take any decision for you, but provide tools to ease tasks as much as possible once you have decided what to do ;)

(And installing new software is really easy compared to other distributions, it just take more time because of compilation time)
 

Slougi

New member
pj64er said:
of course, you can always try out the portage system on your slack install :p

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=28559
That's an ugly ugly hack.

As to differences, it is mainly package management. While slack has no automatic package management, portage is basically what gentoo is. It is used to download packages, upgrade them, uninstall them etc. This means that you can set up gentoo basically any way you want, easily. Granted, there are things like swaret etc. for slackware, but they are less advanced than gentoo. Then there are more subtle things, like different init scripts, and so on. It takes a lot more time to update gentoo, install packages etc. since everything is compiled from source, contrary to slackware's binary packages. They're both good distros, but I'd say gentoo is maybe a bit easier, apart from the install. I certainly like the gentoo init scripts a lot more than the traditional System V type scripts used elsewhere :)
 

AlphaWolf

I prey, not pray.
Isn't slackware intended to be as close to a classic unix environment as possible? (e.g. just a plain unix clone)
 

pj64er

PJ64 Lubba
One is designed around an improved version of BSD's 'port' system, the other is designed to be as BSD-ish as possible but without the 'port' system :p
 

Eagle

aka Alshain
Moderator
What I want to know is how they are planning to move Gentoo into the next kernel versions. Unless I'm mistaken Gentoo explicitly uses DevFS which isnt supported by the 2.6 kernels, so how is this done? The whole Gentoo system revolves around it, or so it would seem.
 

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