Why Gentoo?

[jedthehumanoid]

for a long time i had been meaning to try out gentoo because i kept reading all this hype about it. i had tried installing it a couple times only to find that it was going to take a bit more time and effort than i thought in order to get the system up and running. (which on a side note is funny because debian still seems to have the rep for being the hardest linux flavor to install and that seems rather simple in comparison.) well, finally about two weeks ago i had enough spare time to do the full install (stage 1 tarball) and build the box from the ground up. i had made a few mistakes here and there but was able to get them fixed for the most part. however, i eventually found that after all those hours of i686/athlon-tbird optimized compiles, my system was no faster than any other distro. (yes i got hdparm going and i spent most of my install prep time carefully considering my use flags and configing how things would get built.) i mean i guess i would understand the comprimise of lost time during compiles if the system showed some serious speed like everyone says it does but dude, my system was slower if anything than it was before. i was running the stock gentoo kernel which seemed to be pretty light from what i saw...... anybody have similar experiances? anyone think i'm crazy? let me know, im curious what other people think and i posted the question here at justlinux to avoid a one-sided reaction.

on an upside however, gentoo has the best distro specific forum i've seen. people are very helpful and there are some great tips to be learned for any linux user out there. (one thing debian lacks IMHO)

one more thing, if your going to flame me, be creative with your jests:D

[arkaine23]

If it is faster, its .001% faster, which you wouldn't really be able to notice. Linux is linux after all, no matter what flavor.

The reason I like it is that you build it from scratch pretty much and compile everything (except openoffice in my experience). So there's a lack of bloat associated with your common redhat/mandrake type distros.

The portage system is really convenient to use for installing, updating, and uninstalling packages, much like apt-get.

The user community is very large and helpful.

The gentoo kernel comes with support for 3.5 GB of user-addressable memory (something I need), without having to pay for it like in redhat (only other distro I've found that offers it) or having to dig forever to find it as a patch.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by arkaine23
The gentoo kernel comes with support for 3.5 GB of user-addressable memory (something I need), without having to pay for it like in redhat (only other distro I've found that offers it) or having to dig forever to find it as a patch. What?!?!

It's not that hard, just enable CONFIG_HIGHMEM and CONFIG_HIGHMEM_4GB when configuring your kernel. No need to pay anybody anything.

[jedthehumanoid]

Originally posted by arkaine23
The portage system is really convenient to use for installing, updating, and uninstalling packages, much like apt-get.



i could see that. actually, as far as portage goes i found it's dependancy solving abilities to be a bit stronger than apt.

the sweet thing about debian also is the ability to make a deb package out of a kernel compilation. so if i wanted to compile a kernel for an old slow machine, i could do it on a newer machine and put the deb onto a floppy and transport it to the other machine. that way i can compile and install a kernel on p133 in about 15 minutes even though the machine can't process it that fast. in your case that would allow you to set up your kernel with your memory requirements and then you could just save the deb in case you need it in the future.

installing a kernel from the deb kernel image takes all of about 20 seconds. and it even automates the setup of lilo for you!

[Hayl]

Originally posted by arkaine23
If it is faster, its .001% faster, which you wouldn't really be able to notice. Linux is linux after all, no matter what flavor.

- X is definately faster when compiled for your system. (i quit using Debian because i found its binary X package to be slow.)

- anything command line based, you won't notice a difference.

- wordprocessors, etc you won't notice a difference.

having said that, the newer your hardware is, the more speed increase you will notice if you compare the same system running on a binary-based distro.

Originally posted by jetthehumanoidi could see that. actually, as far as portage goes i found it's dependancy solving abilities to be a bit stronger than apt

actually, debian's apt system is far more robust/mature than gentoo's portage system and better at handling deps.

[mr orion77]

lol, im keen to try gentoo, out of curiosity.
i found debian much easier to use than mandrake. being in control allows you to see whats happening.

isnt it supposed to take days to install gentoo?
sounds like fun, but then it would surely be better to do the LFS thing wouldnt it.
the package system is supposed to rock i hear.

[randabis]

getting a base command line system going only takes a few hours...it's getting X, and all the goodies you want that takes days hehe...I didn't think the wait is justified because there was no noticeable performance difference on my system

[jedthehumanoid]

yeah, at the very least, i would say that installing gentoo taught me a whole hell of a lot of stuff i didn't know about linux.

as far as install time, it depends on the speed of your machine and the speed of your internet connection. i found that with my athlon 1.4 and a dsl line that averaged about 95kbps, it took about 3-4 hours if memory serves to do the initial install. the catch is that after doing that, you still have nothing but the base system. no x, no gnome or kde, no office progs.....so even on a modern machine, with a fast connection, and your own leraning speed, you may want a good day to do it. (note, when copiling things, you don't need to be there the whole time. and once, you get your box going, you could be compiling progs in the backround while doing other things...)

and it's kind of a neat feeling when the thing boots the first time, because of the whole ordeal.

best advice i can offer is to make sure you set up portage to download from the closet mirror as the default in my case was slow.

[jedthehumanoid]

another thing:
this was my mistake but at one point i had started compiling the xserver and kde by doing emerge kde or whatever the exact syntax was...now i knew it was going to take a long time so i figured hell, i'll go to bed and it will be done in the morning.

now, i had made a mistake in my use flags so it had only done about 10 minutes worth of work and then errored out. now, as i've said i had made the mistake on this but i was still pissed. i mean i woke and was going to sit down at my newly finished install only to find out that it wasn't finished!

[mr orion77]

im still using a p3, 256mb and 56k modem. gentoo is out of the question. im sticking with debian.

[arkaine23]

Originally posted by jedthehumanoid
i could see that. actually, as far as portage goes i found it's dependancy solving abilities to be a bit stronger than apt.

the sweet thing about debian also is the ability to make a deb package out of a kernel compilation. so if i wanted to compile a kernel for an old slow machine, i could do it on a newer machine and put the deb onto a floppy and transport it to the other machine. that way i can compile and install a kernel on p133 in about 15 minutes even though the machine can't process it that fast. in your case that would allow you to set up your kernel with your memory requirements and then you could just save the deb in case you need it in the future.

installing a kernel from the deb kernel image takes all of about 20 seconds. and it even automates the setup of lilo for you!


Gentoo can compile kernels pretty quick... usually takes me about 2 minutes. make install automatically moves the system.map and kernel image to /boot and updates the bootloader.

[Raoul_Duke]

I don't really understand how people don't notice the difference with gentoo. I first tried a stage-3 install, just to try it out and found it to be much quicker than RH8 (what i used at the time).

I've tried most of the popular distros and a few not so well known ones too and nothing comes close to Gentoo's performance. These days i have a fully optimised stage-1 install with ck-sources kernel and xfree 4.3.0.-r2 and KDE 3.1.1a..........and it runs like a puppy on my old celeron 433mhz with 256 ram and a voodoo3 card. I run most modern games and even mozilla is pretty snappy :eek:

Still, guess it's differrent for everyone :confused:

[jedthehumanoid]

Originally posted by Raoul_Duke
I don't really understand how people don't notice the difference with gentoo. I first tried a stage-3 install, just to try it out and found it to be much quicker than RH8 (what i used at the time).

I've tried most of the popular distros and a few not so well known ones too and nothing comes close to Gentoo's performance. These days i have a fully optimised stage-1 install with ck-sources kernel and xfree 4.3.0.-r2 and KDE 3.1.1a..........and it runs like a puppy on my old celeron 433mhz with 256 ram and a voodoo3 card. I run most modern games and even mozilla is pretty snappy :eek:

Still, guess it's differrent for everyone :confused:

that's strange. i would have thought that gentoo would offer less advantage on an older machine. maybe the opposite i guess...? do you use a lot of use flags, or only a few? how long did it take to get your system up on that processor speed?

on a side note, your avator/screename is f*&kin' cool as hell!;)