[clue-tech] Gentoo

[adam bultman]

I used gentoo for quite a while; while I didn't have the fastest system
in the world, I couldn't really tell if it was "faster" or not.

I did however learn a lot about bootstrapping, fixing broken packages
(if any), tweaking things, and all that.   It was a very useful
experience, and I used it for quite a while until I simply had no more
time to spend working on things - and waiting for things when I wanted
them (for example, I remember Openoffice taking 11 hours to compile -
quite a bit of lag time to open a simple excel spreadsheet.)

One thing to keep in mind when using gentoo - you need to do etc-update
any time you update a package, and etc-update is a fairly time consuming
process in itself, since if you make changes, you need to make sure that
anything you changed gets put into the new version - and if you don't be
careful, you can quickly have yourself a non-booting machine, or at
least a severely malfunctioning one.

If you do any benchmarking, and happen to have any benchmarks for when
that box was another distro, let me know. I'd like to know if it is
"faster" from a benchmarking standpoint, since I didn't always notice
things on the desktop.

Adam

Jason Ash wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As some of you know, I tried out LFS last fall. While this was a great
> learning experience, sorting out and installing all of the
> dependencies for things like KDE was a headache. Not to mention I
> couldn't get KDE to work. Four valid reasons to do LFS (IMHO) are:
> 1) The learning experience (the best reason)
> 2) Specific custom requirements (not me)
> 3) Exercising technical know-how (not yet there)
> 4) Micromanagement of your OS (I won't)
>
> I remember someone saying at one of our meetings that he uses Gentoo
> because it's optimized and he never has to upgrade (since portage is
> always up-to-date). So, I just got finished installing the Gentoo base
> system, and I'm installing the KDE4 meta-package. The nice thing about
> Gentoo is that it automatically downloads all the needed dependencies
> in addition to the requested package and compiles them from source.
> I'm using -O2 and pentium4 optimizations. So far, KDE4 in its entirety
> has taken 26 hours to download and compile. I'll let you know how it
> goes and if it's faster.
>
> Thanks,
> Jason Ash
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>   

-- 
Adam