Thinking about switching from Gentoo

[scottneh]

Hello,

I'm thinking about switching to Kubuntu and figure this is a good place to start and as a few questions. My system is a dual quadcore Intel W5580 based machine with 32 GB RAM and I am currently running Gentoo's latest stable kernel for my hardware.

There area few CAE packages I would like to use and a particular configuration I would like to and wanted to see what the effort is like to witch to Kubuntu. I have four hard drives on the system. One for the OS and its components, one for programs not related to the OS and two mirrored as a RAID set for data from numerical simulations.

Gentoo has a few nice things about it like portage and simply being able to type "emerge -xxxx" and get waht ever program you want but its difficult to control where you want the program to go. Still its really convenient to install software that way. Does Kubuntu have anything similar?

Gentoo gives me the ability to build my system from the ground up and I am specify USE flags specifically for my hardware. Any similar options for Kubuntu?

I would appreciate any help that can be offered, opinions, discussions about the differences, etc. would all be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Scott

[toad]

Re: Thinking about switching from Gentoo

Hm, CAE in wikipedia didn't give me anything useful so I don't actually know what you are talking about, sorry.

Your set-up won't be a problem whichever distro you use - just a question of setting it up right.

As for programmes - debian based distros are renowned for the amount of prepackaged software. All you need is the right repo, but even the standard ones are pretty impressive.

Not sure about flags on kubuntu/debian, sorry. As an Archer I know how to approach it in arch but not kubuntu.

Great thing about kubuntu imo: install and go + great community. Thing with gentoo is that once it has actually compiled it is out of date (perhaps that is why you have a machine which is just short of a supercomputer... )

And my 2 cents' worth: Arch affords you more freedom - check it out if you feel like it. Plus, it follows the rolling release idea (as does sidux).

HTH

[scottneh]

Re: Thinking about switching from Gentoo

Thanks for the input.

CAE is Computer Aided Engineering. This includes CAD, Computer Aided Drafting and my primary use is for Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). These are all number crunching intensive so a good clean OS that I don't have to update every week (at least not manually) and doesn't take a week to update is what I am looking for. I like Gentoo for its flexibility but there are times where it drives me nuts and I just want and OS that works.

One of the things that is driving toward kubuntu is that there are two programs I want to use, CAELinux and UG/NX. CAELinux is specifically designed with Ubuntu/Kubuntu in mind and UG/NX has been tested and runs well on Kubuntu.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Thinking about switching from Gentoo

I've never tried Gentoo, but I can say that apt-get is the simplest package installer I've ever used, better than portage from what I've read.

I think the USE flags are specific to Gentoo...

[blobfish]

Re: Thinking about switching from Gentoo

UG/NX has been tested and runs well on Kubuntu.

Cool. I have been running UG for about 10 years. The last I heard, UG was only supporting red hat and suse. Has that changed? I did read a post on the ubuntu forums where a guy had altered the install scripts to get it going. Maybe that is what you are referring to? I was toying with the idea of switching UG to linux, but I had a lot of ufuncs using MFC that would have to be changed and I have since let my UG maintenance run out. Tool and Die is dead in michigan and I was tired of paying $4500 a year for dialog and icon changes. I would enjoy hearing anything more about your UG and Kubuntu experience. Good luck.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Thinking about switching from Gentoo

You can always install VirtualBox on your Gentoo installation and make Kubuntu 10.4 a guest OS. Then play with it. VB may not run 3D graphics (it depends on your box) but you can get a feel for Kubuntu without actually installing it on your HD.

OR, you can use gparted and separate out about 10GB and install Kubuntu LL on your HD. Then you'll know. If you don't like it you can use Gentoo to delete the partition and reset your grub, or what ever Gentoo uses to as a boot menu.