Run as Root <--- Note: This article will only make sense if you have any knowledge of Linux.
Be a Man
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Man of Honour
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I can't run as Root any more, I shaved my beard off recently and my ability to bash has severely diminished 
Excellent article, raised a chuckle here
Excellent article, raised a chuckle here
No.. running Gentoo is the kind of thing that should put you in a lunatic asylum for your own good, and the safety of others around you
I run as root, on vital servers!
No.. running Gentoo is the kind of thing that should put you in a lunatic asylum for your own good, and the safety of others around you
Don't be such a blouse. Gentoo isn't nearly as hard as you think!
Soldato
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I run OSX as root also.
Dude, you're talking to a guy who has built systems up from a stage 1, numerous times, and used to love it completely. I've used Gentoo from the days when you didn't even have that fancy GUI installer that you get these days, when all was done by hand at a command line.
I've also admin'd servers at high end levels.. and quite simply put: There is absolutely no sane, rational reason for Gentoo. None whatsoever. Seriously. Use something like Ubuntu, Debian or CentOS and discover the shocking concept of "It just works". No arsing about with USE flags, no wasting time waiting for packages to compile with optimised flags that save you 0.001 of a second. It just works. Never have I been on an Ubuntu box decided I wanted to do something I hadn't originally planned, only to find out I need to add another USE flag or two to achieve it, and discover that requires the recompilation of a dozen other packages. Not once. I've lost track how many times I've had that happen with Gentoo, even when I've been generous with the USE flags, and lets be honest, the moment you start being generous with the USE flags you might as well be using a binary based distribution that has all the features compiled in anyway.
For those odd few tiny packages you might need some bizarre function they haven't compiled in, you can still grab the sources and build 'em anyway.
Take MythTV as a prime example. IIRC on my old Linux box, an Athlon 2500+, that would take, what 60 minutes to compile, and maybe 5 minutes to grab dependencies before that? Maybe a little longer. I've just done a quick test and it's taken 5 minutes to download and install on my Ubuntu workstation. 5 minutes. You know what, it does everything that Gentoo install did. Oh sure it might take a fraction of a second longer to load (assuming you're not stupid and use O2 instead of O3 which results in bigger binaries that take longer to load), but do you really notice a fraction of a second? These days? With all the spare processing power we have on our PCs?
When it all boils down to it, Gentoo is what most techies realise is called "over optimisation". Yes, it is more optimal, but when you actually look at it, dispassionately, honestly, the amount of work, or the amount of time spent compiling the packages required does not match the benefit. Not in any way, shape or form.
That's without even going into the utterly stupid idea of a single consolidated portage where the idea is to shove the latest greatest version into it rather than having a standard solid base on which to have the core of the OS settle on. Very few other distros are that stupid.
heh good stuff..
I didnt realise you could run osx as root? Going to look into that
Back in the early OSX days it was shockingly easy to get to root. Had to do it once too when a member of staff at a previous employers left under a black cloud leaving some Mac's locked up solidly, naively believing that kept all the stuff he didn't want us to see hidden. No challenge for me once I'd got root, naturally, as you could just run "passwd username" and all sorts of interesting stuff came out of the woodwork.
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