[ILUG] Suggestions for best 64 bit Linux distro?

[Paul Jakma]

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, nadir at compsoc.nuigalway.ie wrote:

> True , I have also been commenting however on the magnificent 
> howto's on the forums and the wiki, we have guides to all sorts of 
> stuff, tinkering is usually minimal because of these howto's, but 
> all the knowledge is there if you want to get stuck in.

To that extent, Gentoo is probably a good thing, for people eager to 
learn lots of details about how a distro puts software together.

[ -msome-abi, -mno-foo, fancythreadsonly, etc...]

Arg, no - I don't care! Really.. I don't see why I need to know about 
those things.

> dunno, I usually go through the configure, if im going to compile 
> something manually. Say like an application that has qt support, qt 
> libs are pretty big, what if we dont want to have them on our 
> machine at all, and just want an application that supports sdl say, 
> but not qt.

I said configure /options/ can be evil, specifically unnecessary 
configure options. There's nothing worse than a tonne of weird and 
wonderful options.

The configure scripts are fine. But I want to run them and have the 
damn thing just pick the right options - that's what its for. If 
there's a dependency missing, I want it to tell me. No more :).

> the ebuilds just wrap the software, in the case of americas army, 
> it goes online, and installs the latest verion, does everything, 
> but in the case of doom3, it installs the linux installer, and 
> tells you to copy the pak files over

Cool. RPM can do that too, I think - via SRPMS which reference binary 
tarballs. Debian dpkg's can /definitely/ do it.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
I'm so broke I can't even pay attention.