[gentoo-user] Re: Is Gentoo for me?

[»Q«]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2012 21:03:47 -0600
John <irgunii@×××××.com> wrote:

>
> Hi folks,
>
>   I've been using linux for about 12 years now, but only used DE's.
> I've got ADD in the extreme and have poor memory retention so trying
> to learn things 'UNIX' (command line and such) is just too difficult
> for me. I can do some command line stuff but nothing more than
> getting time from someplace to make my clock be correct, heh.

Gentoo is relatively high-maintainance, and you'll find yourself
typing at a command line quite a bit.  But Gentoo's documentation is
very good, so if you forget what you need to do, you can just look it
up again.  Or ask here -- very good answers are usually quick to come.
  
>   I'm dirt-poor and have only a dial-up connection. The Portage
> package management seems extremely nice, but will it be a problem for
> me to upgrade say just one package/app at a time? Will I be able to
> find a tarball of an app I want to try out and be able to build it
> like I would with rpmbuild (will it be as relatively easy as that)?
> Is there a 'repository' of apps anywhere that I can go to to look and
> see if the app I normally use for something is there?

I've run Gentoo on a machine with dial-up.  I wouldn't do it again.
Gentoo's rolling release system means IMHO the only sane way to
maintain it is to keep it up to date, which means a lot of downloading.

It's possible to have portage generate a list of the files it wants,
take that list to another machine, feed it to some download manager,
then take the files back to the Gentoo machine.  

>   There's probably more questions, but I best keep this short for
> now, lol. Thanks for any replies and help with these things and I
> hope I made enough sense for everyone to understand what I'm trying
> to get at.

I think you were plenty clear, and I wish you luck. :)