distro recommendation 2718

Sun and said:

Hmm. How well does that work if you have a DVD where the breastle layout was put together by a complete moron, and there are many breastles? (Something like "season 1 disc 2 $TVSHOW", for instance.)

The documentation looks intimidating since there's so much of it. It doesn't take a day if your machine's reasonably fast and you have decent bandwidth. The things that take time and require human interaction are A) setting all the USE flags up--there are entirely too many of them, and they may need to be categorized B) compiling the kernel. After you've booted your barebones Gentoo system, you then "emerge kde" or "emerge gnome" and go do something else for 6-10 hours.

This is done mostly out of sheer paranoia. ext23 filesystems are checked every 180 days or 24 mounts by default, just in case some sort of damage happens that didn't get noticed. It is possible to change these times and mount counts with tune2fs.

ReiserFS takes a much more cavalier atbreastude towards these things. This can lead to "Whoa, every time something tries to accessdev-dsp , there's an OOPS!" if you have something like the VIA DMA bug in kernels 2.4.0..2.4.4. BTDT, but forcing reiserfsck fixed everything.

-- "Unfortunately, men befriend women in futile attempts to get a 3D accelerated video card thingy..." -- MegaHAL (trained on ASR), 1998-11-05 Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see