can anyone compare gentoo, lunar, and mepis(debian)

[bosewicht]

I currently have Mandrake and am looking for something "better" right now i am at a toss up between gentoo, lunar, and mepis. Basically wha ti want is a lean, fast OS using firebird, thunderbird, wine, and apollon (giFT gui). I dislike mandrake b/c of the rpm's. Any help would be appreciated. the computer this will be installed on is a e machine 433i

[Belial]

Well, as far as I'm concerned Gentoo has some of the best performance a distribution can offer at this time. The other distributions are binary while Gentoo is source. Meaning you'll be able to customize Gentoo to be optimized for your hardware through the use of CFLAGS, whereas the the binary distributions use one set specification for cpu.

Gentoo is definitely nothing like Mandrake and it will take much longer to get going because you have to compile the whole system from scratch. The install is also not for the faint at heart...however they provide step by step instructions and you shouldn't have too much of a problem. After the installation is done and you boot to prompt:

emerge application-here

This will download the app, any dependencies it requires, compile them, and you're ready to go.

It's still fairly young, there are some bugs to be fixed...but it's definitely on the right track and you shouldn't be disappointed.

[Dillinger]

I'm sure you could figure out my vote

[heartsmagic]

i want to ask a question at this point.
what if i dont have an internet connection (or a speed one or
not) do you suggest Gentoo?

[andutt]

the emerge command first looking in your local portage tree before it goes out on the internet to find never ones... If you dont have any internetconnection its no catastroph... just choose the linux dist you think can suite you for the moment...

[heartsmagic]

hmm ok i got it.that means i cant use Gentoo effeciently if i install it.. go to other ones.

[andutt]

No it means that Redhat,Mandrake,Suse,Gentoo works pretty much the same, and its just the mode for the moment that decides on which dist you like to run.

I usually recommends thoose dists...they work quite the same exept for example redhat using rpm and gentoo is using emerge.... The internet connection doesnt matter so much you can use any of thoose dists anyway. Everything you need is on the installation cd:s..