Gentoo advantage? (was: [TriLUG] What distro do you use AT WORK on your SERVERS.)

[David Brain]

OK, as I started this (sorry):

>From an installation perspective, it's no worse than anything else
(assuming you have a good level of Linux experience), and once it's
booted from the install CD I can drive the install remotely, which is
nice for doing more than one install at once, or just avoiding having
to put up with the noise of the servers.  I spend just as long on a
Gentoo install as I do on a RHEL install (or Win2k3 come to that).

The configuration is very transparent,  I'm typically setting up
single purpose servers - so being able to control what is installed,
and what gets started up at boot time is vital from a security
perspective.  Other distributions tend to start up 'helpful' daemons I
just don't need and definitely don't want listening on the network. 
Also Gentoo tends to have some degree of support for bleeding edge
(sometimes to the point of clinical shock) versions of packages, for
example I was running a Gentoo version of the Xen3 packages while it
was still in beta. Note that by default Gentoo only auto installs
stable versions, but you can (at your own risk) hint to it that you
want to install beta/alpha packages.

Compilation time is typically not a big issue (decent machines & distcc).

David.