Ugh…. Upgrades…
by Slack, on July 9th, 2003
So, today I remotely upgraded my server at home from work. It’s not something you really have to “do” with Gentoo; more something you watch. Pretty neat stuff. But, anyway, long story short, when I reboot the server with the new upgrades, it seemed I missed a few things, as I could not ping it anymore. Let me tell ya there is nothing worse that a machine being un pingable after an upgrade. Well, for me anyway. lol Turns out, that I forgot to configure one little conf file which had placed my server on the wrong subnet. Ack! So, looks like me setting up this “practice” server is a damn good thing as it is obvious I need a bit more practice. :) lol
I use redhat 7.3 right now at home, networked with my Mac. I’m hoping to get a couple of Windows Machines as well, then I’m going to use the Linux box for my backups (it has a built in zip drive.
Just to satisfy my curiousity, what made you go with Gentoo?
You haven’t lived until you’ve “emerged” X Windows. :) The best thing by far about Gentoo is the portage utility. It’s similar to FreeBSD’s Ports system (from what I hear). Basically, it’s a tool that retreives the source code for a program (various source packages are kept on lots of mirrors), compiles the code based on settings you’ve tailored in your make.conf file (so that the code is compiled JUST FOR YOU), and then installs it. It makes it just as easy to “uninstall” a program. And the best part is that it makes it that easy to update your system. When it’s time to update your system (various proggies), you just type “emerge -u world” and emerge will update every package on your system that it finds newer source code for. It really is the best thing I’ve seen in the linux world. Made it easy to get down to business, rather than wading through dependency hell (oh yeah, BTW, it automagically handles dependencies too). :)
http://www.gentoo.org
If you are serious about Linux, you *need* to at least look at Gentoo. :)