So, after fighting several problems with ebuilds blocking on my Gentoo VServers, I decided to move them over to Debian.

I am not sure why I ever really started running Gentoo. Back in the day, I am guessing I was lured by all the "advantages" of Gentoo. Compiling from source to get more optimization, the great package manager, only installing what I decided I need by USE flags. But, over the years, it seems that the package tree has started having more and more bad ebuilds in it, and the Gentoo developer community seems to have really gone down hill as of late. And I am really getting tired of having to wait for my upgrades to compile from source everytime.

So, away I went to move everything over. I had the web server all moved over in a couple of hours, and was suprised at how easy it was (there was one hitch, which I will talk about in a minute). When it was all said and done, I went from my webserver taking 6 gigs to under 2 gigs. Now, I am not sure if I just had a bunch of stuff that I did not need, but to me that takes away the "lightness" of a a Gentoo install.

The hitch that I spoke of above was the apache2 mysql authentication module was not available in Debian etch. Seems that when they cut the release it would not compile against the version of apache2 they had. There was a couple of ways to solve the problem I found on the 'net, one of which was to grab the package from unstable. When I started down that path, I was going to end up with all kinds of packages from unstable. I had done this once before when I was running Debian, and it ended up causing me all kinds of problems in the long run. So, I went the route of compiling the module from source.

And there is one of the things I like about running Linux, there is always more then one way to solve a problem, and usually there is someone who has gone before me.