Ed Fletcher posted on Sat, 19 May 2012 22:24:21 -0300 as excerpted: > I tried Gentoo a long time ago. Like ten or twelve years, I think, > maybe more. The only thing I can remember from that experience is that > after four or five days of compiling absolutely everything multiple > times, I never did get a system that I could use. I would think that > it's a lot better now.
FWIW, much has changed since then... in all of Linux, and in computers in general. Quad-cores with 8 gigs RAM are almost standard, now days, parallel makes are standard as well, and they GREATLY speed up the build process. I first switched to gentoo with a dual socket first gen opteron and a gig of ram, and remember kde (alone) taking about a day (8-ish hours) to build and install. Now days (with the same mobo and dual- socket, but upgraded to top-of-their-line dual-core opteron 290s, so 2x2- core, with six gig ram, with the scratch build space in in tmpfs/ram as well) I do an a kde upgrade in about two hours, three for the first in a series (4.x.0 except that I've been running the betas and rcs recently as well, so 4.(x-1).80) or if something goes wrong that I need to fix and redo some of the builds that failed as a result. 2-3 hours means I can do other things that day as well. And a full emptytree world rebuild is only about a day. The first gentoo install I tried wasn't quite 10 years ago yet, 2004.0. But it was the first one to have NPTL (now standard, native POSIX threading libraries, instead of the old Linux-threads), and I was trying to build directly to it, and failed. So I stuck around on the lists and answered questions where I could for a couple months, learning all the time, and I still don't know what they fixed but 2004.1 installed just fine. =:^) Now days of course they have automated weekly-updated stage-three snapshot builds. I've done a couple of those, one in a 32-bit chroot on my main machine, building for my gen 1.5 acer aspire one netbook (before the netbooks switched to that stupid chipset with the graphics Intel outsourced and thus couldn't do proper freedomware drivers for), a couple for a friend. Stage-3 builds are much easier, and the weekly snapshots means that they're pretty current, too. For stable users (I always run ~/ testing, here), it means that first rebuild is generally the same version or a very small update, and "just works". But I never tried gentoo on a single-core under a gig of ram (except on my netbook, but I build for it in a chroot on my quad-core) and I'd not recommend it. Even dual-cores require a lot of patience, and you really do want a gig per core these days, so a dual-core should be two-gigs, minimum, ram-wise. The quad-core with 6 gigs on my main rig is quite reasonable. Below that, you'll need quite a bit of patience, and below dual-core w/ 2 gig ram, I'd not recommend for newbies at all, unless they're masochists. Unless you have a bigger machine to build on as I do for my netbook, that's binary distro territory. But on a modern quad- core, 4+ gigs ram, I'd argue that an automated build-from-source like gentoo is ideal, the best of both worlds, the flexibility of building from source, with the automation of setting it up the way you want and then upgrades are less trouble than they'd be elsewhere, as the builds might take a bit more time but they're all automated, and the rolling release bit means a few upgrades at a time, no huge new distro version flag-days where you never know what broke that which was working just fine, before. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
