tschüss Gentoo, hello Ubuntu!
...need I say more? *^_^*
Well, last thursday I gave myself this awesome videocard (well, from my PoV it’s awesome, a gamer will think different maybe…)... Anyway, because of this card and because I had some free time, I thought it would be a good idea to update my Gentoo-install before I continued in having fun with this new card. Even though this install was a couple of months old, there was a whole lot to update, including packages that block other packages etc.
But, somehow when I removed packages that blocked the ability to update others, something went downhill and it kept going that way. I kept having compiler-errors, no matter what I did. glibc wouldn’t compile, make(!) wouldn’t compile… In the end I decided to install from scratch but even that gave the same errors on glibc/make/gcc when I tried to update/upgrade Gentoo 2006.1 to current.
Bates somehow liked the compiler output better than I did…
click to go to the corresponding pic on flickr
Well, after almost two days of console-output and such I decided that this is too much pain for the potential gain, so goodbye Gentoo, it’s been nice (and this server still runs on it…). With my busy schedule lately I really can’t afford myself having a workstation that needs that much work to keep it going, even though I, most of the times, loved it. And I’m pretty sure this could be solved, but for me, maybe some other time. The Gentoo/*BSD-development seems promising, but for now, I really have some work to do…
well, the logo rocks!
When I read the following, I really asked myself if Gentoo is the best ‘workstation OS’ for my needs…
“After problems with a bug on his own system Robbins (the creator of Gentoo) halted Gentoo Linux development and switched to FreeBSD for several months”
Gentoo on Wikipedia
I’m a Gentoo user for almost three years now, but lately I hadn’t gotten much fun out of it. I even started to postpone updates on weekdays even though I really wanted to do them, simply because I really didn’t know where it would end up this time. And somehow, that’s not an ideal situation for a workstation. So, I now chose something that just works and boy it does. This afternoon I put in a Ubuntu Live-CD for AMD64 and now, a couple of hours later, I’ve got my full-blown desktop back, almost exactly as I had it before (in my case both on Gentoo and on Ubuntu, it’s Gnome on top).
Well, I’ve been paying attention to the workstation-part of this workstation first. At this time I’ve got Firefox 2.0 with Flash9(!) running, which is marvelous. I was able to move over a lot of my settings and files, so from a user-PoV, hardly anything changed, everything is just there! SMP on Xeon EM64T, dual monitor, nvidia-driver, GIMP, OpenOffice, Thunderbird with all my mail, the whole shebang… Now, tomorrow it’s sunday, let’s see if I can get at least one game running…
After more than two days with this new videocard, this is what I got… *^_^*
In the mean time, I’ve been playing Need for Speed Most Wanted on my other setup, my Media Center, so it’s not all work and no play cause you know, that keeps the doctor away makes Jack a dull boy…
*^_^*
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Yea! Good Choice! I’ve been using Ubuntu since 5.04 and have never had a problem.
Having a distro like Gentoo is great, however if you need a desktop that you KNOW will work, ubuntu is where it’s at.
Now it’s just a matter of time until you try out Kubuntu and see just how amazing KDE is. (Trust me, I used to be a hardcore Gnome fan (“Screw that KDE bloatware”), but now I swear by it!
You should give beryl a go now you have a pretty strong 3d card in there, mostly eye candy but couple of useful things to. http://beryl-project.org/
ahh, good man. right choice with ubuntu.
I’m more of a KDE fan and they cater for us also! I’ve been using Kubuntu for a long time now and it is fantastic.
A much easier install the Debian thats for sure!