Gentoo Linux -- Tackle it

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I mean I happened upon that very document for the first time just today.

It was hosted on a different server, but I was reading it just today. It was a good read.

But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well.

Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort takes motivation. Successful athletes get their motivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushing themselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, to be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.

If you aren't the kind of person that feels this way naturally, you'll need to become one in order to make it as a hacker. Otherwise you'll find your hacking energy is sapped by distractions like sex, money, and social approval.


Its got a good message. Basically.... get to grips with some powerful stuff like C++ and UNIX, but use it in a mature and adult fashion. That's what a "hacker" is - a "cracker" however is a person who uses these things to do malicious damage, basically being a stupid kid. Learn to be a "hacker" - a geek with a keen mind and a powerful grasp of computing, and use it in a positive and interesting, fruitful way, that benefits the whole computing community.

Sorry about going off topic, but he did ask.





Originally posted by Soul Harvester And gentoos installer isn't an installer - It's about as close to LFS as you're going to get. Basically it is giving you a shell, some tools, and a tar'ed base... then of course it gives you emerge.. theoretically you could use it just as easily to prep any linux installation. I personally use my gentoo liveCD as a rescue disc for my other machines.

I am sure that Debian does this as well - basically, you can download an image for a floppy disk, boot from it, use it to get your system prepped for an installation, and then it downloads source code and compiles everything for you, following exactly your specifications.

This gives you a lot of control over what sort of OS you are building up, but at the same time, makes it harder and less attractive for people to write compatible applications, drivers, etc for the OS in question.

A lot of hardware manufacturers only offer Linux drivers for very stablished, market leaders like Red Hat, etc. Sometimes, they only support the stock kernel that was installed as part of the "out of the box" install - i.e. you can't use a kernel you have compiled by hand. Certainly, a RAID controller card I just got from Promise had exactly this problem, and only wanted to work with the stock kernel that came along with Red Hat 9.

Even although I might get shot for this, I sometimes think that Linux (with all of its different distros) is too diverse, and could benefit from some consolidation.
 
Yeah, after I read that article I was like, "Hey. I'm 75% hacker!" So I decided to 1. Use Linux (instead of Windows) and 2. Learn some more programming.
 
Don't waste any more time not getting STUCK RIGHT INTO PROGRAMMING, especially C++, Java, C#, etc. I deeply regret neglecting it for a while. Look to perl, php, etc as well, but only to suppliment C++, which if you are learning to program, is truly the way forward.

C++, when combined with an operating system like Linux, being heavily UNIX based, is a very powerful combination, and you can start to do some very interesting things.

Sorry, off topic again I know.....
 
If you are using Slackware, try installing dropline gnome - its got a nice dropline-installer program that can automatically get updates, etc.

But my favourate update delivery system is still red carpet from Ximian Gnome.
 
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