I went with gentoo back when I was messing with bios level raid and had the
idea of dual booting between windows XP and linux on the same raid volume set.
Gentoo and a recipe for setting up grub make it easy.

I use vmware for running the few windows apps I use and aren't interested
enough in windows games to dual boot it. The XP partition is long gone.

I have a second system for mythtv and I went with gentoo because I wanted
complete control over how it was set up and didn't want any kind of
heavyweight desktop manager. The two systems run distccd and builds have 4
cpu cores (2 on each system) available.

I created a third system as a bedroom mythtv system and was able to simply
copy the main mythtv system, change a few conf files and be up and running
in a couple of hours. I modified it's /usr/local directory to point to the
/usr/local directory on the main mythtv box so I wouldn't have to do updates
to two mythtv systems. I update the main one, and the second one uses the
new version automagicly.

I later changed it to a diskless system by copying all of it's files over to
a subdirectory on the main mythtv system and set the second system for
pxelinux and nfsroot. I played around with suspend to disk , but the system
is so quiet without the disk drive and can boot fast enough that it doesn't
have much advantage.

This is what I love about gentoo. The way it gives the user complete
control over the system, makes setups like the one I enjoy easy and almost
trivial to setup.

AZ Nomad wrote:
> I use vmware for running the few windows apps I use and aren't interested
> enough in windows games to dual boot it. The XP partition is long gone.

I took that one step further and set it up so that I can boot into
Gentoo and run the native XP install in a VM or boot into XP and run the
native Gentoo install in a VM :)

(Though I must always remember to shut down the VM and not just "pause"
it if I want to boot it for real later :P)


> [...]
> This is what I love about gentoo. The way it gives the user complete
> control over the system, makes setups like the one I enjoy easy and almost
> trivial to setup.

I only discovered Gentoo relatively recently (two months ago or such; I
would have to look when I posted here for the first time). I'm using
Linux since ages (I was running Slackware 2 in 1994 :D) Gentoo is by
far the best distro I ever came across. Why the hell I didn't try it
out sooner, no idea. That will teach me to listen to the opinions of
the so-called "experts" (Gentoo is too
difficult/chaotic/breaks/insert-other-false-assumption-here).

My search for the perfect distro ended when I came to Gentoo. Period.