I’m a little worried that my interest in Gentoo means it’s starting to achieve a kind of stylish notoriety that presages loss of original quality, but these folks are so dang hardcore that seems unlikely. Especially given what you have to go through to install and feed the thing. But it is a beautiful construct, and my CPU is never idle any more, with the entire world to emerge.
Thanks to Jonah, all I had to do was pop a new HD into my Thinkpad X20 (a lovely near-silent 20GB Toshiba for $109 on eBay) and then spend the next week or so downloading and compiling. The sweet part of this deal is, of course, that Gentoo has a fantastic system which manages the dependencies between packages and builds everything from source to match your specific configuration. No more RPM hell. No futzing with makefiles. Just type:
emerge kde
And your system is off and running, pulling down the best sources and building and installing them. The docs at Gentoo are quite excellent, but if you don’t have a sophisticated Gentoo friend then get yourself a CD and retain your hair.
So far, I’m sold. For the record, I’ve mostly run RH distros in the past, though I did actually install Yggdrasil way back in ’94 or ’95.
p.s.
I’ve been saving up Jonah’s answers to all my questions in order to post them somewhere as a Gentoo install guide, but I was hoping to convince him to do it. If someone posted a comment I could use that to twist his arm a bit.