So I finally made my choice of new distros. I opted for gentoo. I actually tried archlinux first but it annoyed me insanely within ten minutes (don’t ask me why, it was a taste thing). See this post for more on why I changed.
Anyway, I then went and thought about it. [tag]Gentoo[/tag] is likely to have by far the best 64bit support because it’s a source-based distro – and it turns out to be true it seems.
Now I last used Gentoo a good 3 years ago, so a lot has changed, here then, a short review after my first 3 days, as we speak – I just loaded up my first functional KDE desktop.
The good:
Gentoo works. It takes some setups and even I did the initial stage3 install by following the manual along, but once running, things tend to be very fast. The system has a habit of being bleeding edge and you can do setups and customizations like nothing else allows.
It is definitely not a newbie distro, but then, this was never it’s focus. Gentoo is however an extremely good system for people with a litle bit of patience and knowledge. It is also, without a doubt the most complete 64Bit OS currently available.
the bad
On the downside: Gentoo takes ages to set up, especially if your computer and bandwith aren’t great. I’ve spent most of 3 days compiling just to get a KDE desktop up and running, several times I had to reemerge something because I only later discovered how crucial some USE flag I didn’t even know about was (like if you don’t emerge QT with USE=”opengl” then you can’t emerge kopete). On the other hand, I did choose to use the minimalist CD – if I had chosen the full LIVEcd – this may have been a much quicker process (I have to remember to try it sometime and see what it actually contains).
Genkernel annoyed me a bit. Once I learned that the gentoo minimalist livecd worked fine with my obscure SATA chip, I specifically chose it because the docs said it would produce basically the same kind of kernel (saving me from figuring out how to make the SATA chip go later). Turns out this is not so – the experimental SATA chipsets were left out by genkernel and I had to do a manual rebuild later to get my SATA drive visible (luckilly I have both a PATA drive and a SATA drive and I used the PATA as an OS drive).
The interesting
My thoughts: Gentoo may not be a desktop distro – but you could use it to build one, a great one. I am seeing it in my head. If one spends a bit of time, using it to build a really good system (keeping track of steps) – doing your setups, configs etc. and then build a livecd with a decent 3rd-generation installer out of that- it could be a great system. Which will be able to use portage for package management. It will lack behind other systems in speed of installing programs – but beat them every time in running speed. And ideally, it should automagically emerge world after the first install (in the background) to optimise even the base system for the specific box to the max.
Will I do ? Not yet, but maybe in the future.
As most of you know, I’m not a huge fan of politicians. My recent letter to our beloved Minister of Health being a case in point. The reality is that politics require nothing more than ambition, greed and a certain amount of people skills (specifically: how to manipulate them) to succeed in. While actual skill in any other field is a kind of optional extra. Frankly, anybody who is good at their job, is almost certainly not in politics.
I’m digressing, Douglas Adams said it far more succinctly: anybody who is capable of getting themselves made president should under no account be allowed to do the job.
So I am always pleasantly surprised when a politician (here or anywhere) actually does something, rather than just talking about what they are going to do. The moreso when for a change, the entire government gets something right (probably meaning one or two people on ground-level actually figured it out and had some clout).
Well today is such a day. For a long time the [tag]South Africa[/tag]n government has talked about the virtues of open source, but nothing really concrete ever happened – a lot of positive talk, no real action. Now the very existence of that positive talk is largely due to the existence of the State IT Agency (sita) and the CSIR. Both full of smart people – who have a fairly major advisory position with the government. But just about every time we made a positive move (mandating that government agencies have to look for alternatives – including OSS before buying software) – microsoft gave us a nice big gift of some free windows licenses and nobody did much. Interesting that our very liberal government has consistently use the word ‘open-source’ rather than ‘free software’. I thought they were the government of the freedom fighters ?
Today we saw something actually happen for a change: The government has adopted [tag]ODF[/tag] as an official standard for [tag]government[/tag] [tag]communications[/tag]. Meaning in future, all government comms must use this format (in a very rough nutshell).
Now this is an interesting approach, open standards aren’t good enough and I will argue all who claim they are – we need free software, but they are a big step in the right direction.
Now the only real question is whether the government is serious enough about this to change our ridiculous patent law before it makes ODF effectively illegal to use. See, in SA [tag]software patents[/tag] are not legal. But our system basically grants all [tag]patent[/tag] requests with no investigation for legality (how stupid is that ?) – unless they are challenged. So microsoft tried to patent xml-based document storage here (something with massive amounts of prior art even if it was legal to patent software) – and got it granted. Thanks to [tag]Bob Jolife[/tag] and his team of dedicated volunteers – it is being challenged, but that is proving to be a costly and painful legal exercise.
Apparently the government does not believe that before granting somebody a monopoly on a technology it should at least make sure that the technology complies with the requirements for that monopoly (is of a patentable form, is truly new, is non-obvious etc.).
So the question I put to the government is: Will you protect your newly standardized format from being illegally destroyed by an unconstitutional patent now that you have a vested interest in it ? Will you reform our patent system to include a check-before-grant mechanism of some kind (the ideal being peer-review by others in the same industry) ?
A few days ago, Neil Blakey Milner posted about the upcoming FOSS awards, listing some of the people that makes him believe in the
local [tag]FOSS[/tag] community. I was very pleasantly surprised to see my name on his list. The fact that it is there is certainly flattering.
I think however that if my efforts are that worthy – it also means we have a lot more to do – we need to get to the point where my name is
just one in a list so long, nobody would even notice me anymore.
Yeah I kina like being famous – but I would like to see FOSS succeed in [tag]Africa[/tag] far more :p
