I am looking to take a run at Gentoo in an X86_64 system, and would
like some info on the differences/similarities between FC# and Gentoo,
mostly concerning the basic utilities I have with used since Redhat
4.0 up to FC3.

1. The "mail" utility. I use this in crontab and scripts to send
logfiles to other accounts, "mail -s" and the like. Is the mail
program a Redhat/FC utility or can it be installed on Gentoo as well?

2. Logging. As with above, I use the stock FC logging system, (syslog,
I believe) in crontab. Again, is this emergeable with Gentoo?

3. Crontab. See above.

4. Apache vs. httpd. RH/FC has used httpd, I see gentoo uses Apache.
What are the differences, if any?

Anything else anyone can think of? Thanks in advance.

--
Tom

ben measures

There are many mail utilities, and I'm not sure what FC3 uses. That
said, Gentoo supports many of them, including sendmail and qmail.

Yes. Gentoo supports many loggers, including syslog and syslog-ng.


As above, Gentoo supports many cron daemons, including vixie-cron.

Gentoo supports both, and more. Can you see a recurring theme yet?


Gentoo isn't a fixed distibution but has been described as a
meta-distribution. You have a fairly complete choice of the components
of your system. It's your choice what you have for the mail utility,
logger, cron daemon and http server. If you really want, I'm sure you
could build a system that's pretty much identical to FC3 (but then
that'd be a pretty useless move).

Hth,
--
Ben M.

j.o. aho

mail is from AT&T UNIX and can be installed into Gentoo with: emerge mail-client/mailx

app-admin/syslogd can be used, but I think most uses app-admin/syslog-ng thise
days, as it gives a lot more options than syslogd.


there are many crontab systems to choose from as sys-process/vixie-cron,
sys-process/dcron and sys-process/fcron.

let see, apache is 6 characters long and begins with the character 'a', httpd
is 5 characters long and begins with the character 'h'.

When RedHat changed the default Apache from 1.3x to 2.x, they changed the name
of the RPM package too, so there isn't any difference more than the package name.


The default way of runlevels in Gentoo differences quite a lot from other
linux distros, where 3-5 has been set to the same runlevel by default, but of
course you can make it more like other distros, where having a specific
runlevel with only console and one with X running.

Be carefull with packages like gnome-base/gnome, as it will install a lot of
unnessessary packages.

Be prepared that the portage system is slower than RPM when checking up
information about installed packages and that the portage system don't make
symlinks to fix dependnecies, so you should run revdep-rebuild from time to
time to ensure that you haven't a load of broken applications.

Sometimes packages may change name, which makes that you may get a bit
unsecure system untill you somehow stuble on the information that a package
you have installed has been renamed.

//Aho

No, I wouldn't want to build a system equivalent to FC3, just the few
utilities I am used to. I wasn't positive what supplied mial and
syslogd, but between yours and JO's replies I think I have a pretty
good picture now.

Thanks for the help.

--
Tom


Tom
--

Ah..good, thank you.

Good. I never looked at the source of the RPM's, so I never really
knew what changes were made for them to change the service name.

I rarely install X, but I do like being able to specify. Good tip.

Good pointers, thank you.

Tom
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