Gentoo Linux Installation Journal

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Peijen
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Post by Peijen »

but there should be a way to set default browser right? unless it's hardcoded into the program

Jonathan
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Post by Jonathan »

I doubt it is hardcoded. There ought to be a config somewhere that sets the handlers for different MIME types, but heck if I know where.

Which programs are these, anyway?

Jonathan
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Post by Jonathan »

In other news, we bought a new printer which I am trying to install using USB. For whatever reason, Gentoo's genkernel script set up my parallel port for printer access, but not my USB. The HOWTO on using genkernel to configure your script has been taken offline, presumably for 2.6 updates. I ought to look for a cached copy, I guess. I may upgrade to 2.6 shortly because I hear good things about the modules and devices for 2.6. However, that's fairly cheesey. I have used make menuconfig to configure a kernel before, but I want the script to handle all that junk for me.

In conclusion, Gentoo doesn't suffer from the problems Debian does, but it does have its own set of issues. Gentoo is very slow whenever you need to update the system. emerge sync takes forever, although I sync nightly via cron job now. Building new packages, no surprise, also takes forever. Furthermore, Gentoo is sort of specialized. In the ordering of things, Red Hat has an order of magnitude more users than Debian, which has an order of magnitude more users than Gentoo. That makes Gentoo a really niche distribution.

I have done some checking around, looking at distros like Xandros, Lycoris, Lindows, Knoppix, and SUSE for my next desktop system. None of these meets my requirements, but I have finally found a project that will. It is called UserLinux and was announced back in November. It will be based on Debian, but appears to be addressing many of the issues I had with Debian. For instance, it is using Debian unstable and is also planning on providing a useful, modern, integrated desktop environment out-of-the-box. It will also be free as in beer and speech. I think I will be installing UserLinux on my next hard drive purchase, and possibly when I upgrade my CPU, depending on their status at that point.

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