May 17th, 2009 | nubae
Netbsd Live CD and Gentoo 2009 Review
Netbsd
Live CD/DVD
I was eager to try out this distribution as I'd heard great things about it and
it seemed like a fine new kid on the BSD block. Firing up the cd was simple
enough, and I was greeted with the typical $ prompt signifying a c shell
prompt. I bashed myself in by using the bash command and had a little more
legible prompt. From there, I had to kind of guess how to start up X and be
prompted with a workable desktop environment. I tried several things like
startx, gdm, startkde, etc. I got lucky with startx, which brought me to a
familiar xfce environment. I am no massive fan of xfce, but next to Gnome, it
is my favorite. The layout was nice, and there was an abundancy of essential
apps which any casual user would want. The glaringly missing item though was an
install to disk option. It seems netbsd live cd really is just that. A distro
run from cd, aimed at slower low end machines. This is fine, except it should
be made quite clear from the start with a splash page or something. Another
thing I really disliked, and this goes for all the XFCE run distros, was the
difficulty in finding out how to change my keyboard settings. I must have spent
a good 20 minutes looking for this. Again, this is where openSUSE and Ubuntu
shine. Both those distros have usability perfection. I would say that Ubuntu is
the simplest, but with its simplicity it looses a little of the real cutting edge
openSUSE now has.
Gentoo 2009
I used Gentoo many years ago, when Daniel Robbins was still heading up the
project. Back then it was my distro of choice. One could learn so much about
the inner workings of building an OS from the ground up, and it became the
foundation of my Linux knowledge. Now, in a gaklaxay far far away, Gentoo had
me wondering how it had progressed so many years later. Firing it up is easy
enough with the live cd, which is surprisingly based on the XFCE desktop. I
don't mind the xfce environment so much, other than sometimes it feels a bit
unpolished. It is clearly no Gnome or KDE with all its bells and whistles, but
it sure is a whole load faster and more minimal. I first tried the text based
installer, chose the partition I wanted to install it to, and then it told me
hte feature to mkfs the partition to ext3 was not yet implemented and I should
go to the command line and do that myself. That would be fine, but there were
no instructions included on that. This led me to look for further instructions
about installing Gentoo in general, but all the help files related to XFCE and
not to Gentoo itself. So... I led myself down the graphical install rabbit
hole, which seemed to work ok. It was both easy to use and pretty. All seemed
to be going wonderfully until it ended with ''your install has failed'', along
with a cryptic message saying this could be due to any number of reasons. The
log showed this, but I bet even a Gentoorian couldn't make sense of this:
"ERROR, couold not map"+device+"to anything in the device
map"
So that was it for my adventures with the gentle little penguin known as the
gentoo. Sabayon, it seems, has run circles around its old grand daddy. I mean,
ok, the live cd works, but thats about it... I remember seeing more intriguing
desktops back in the 90s.
