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Yeah, quite a numeric tower it has, eh?

They address this issue in the book's section on numbers.

It's a scripting language that was designed toward the end of the 20th century. It doesn't need all sorts of integers and whatnot. If you need to care that much about speed, memory consumption, etc, you shouldn't be using an interpreted language in the first place. In the domain for which Lua was designed, tall numeric towers are rice.

Ha! I love it when people copy their comments from this site!

Grand archive of fools and their foolish comments on Gentoo...

At least the 2006.0 version is. It challenges the structured narratives about how we've come to expect an installer to look and act.

The graphical installer mysteriously goes silent at about the point where it's supposed to get its install on. The text-mode installer is better, but sometimes it dies mysteriously with cryptic error messages and no way for the user to restore or resume the process, or else correct the problem.

After a few tries I got it going. For my amd64 machine, there was no easy-peezy installer if I wanted to make use of all 64 juicy bits and both succulent cores. So I had to do a by-hand, command-line install like a true gangsta should. I dare say that process was more pleasant, only because command-line installs don't build up your expectations only to let you down.

Obligatory. It never gets old.

I pulled those numbers out of my ass. And I haven't been part of the gentoo community for years, when it first came out the zealots were pretty shrill and I saw a lot of really, really uninformed comments here and in other places around the net.

Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I really like gentoo. Or maybe gentoo fanatics still take anything less than unconditional support as an outright attack. If you've been part of the gentoo community for long, you would know that gentoo supporters started the whole "gentoo user as ricer" meme, to make fun of the people who didn't know what the hell they were doing and just wanted to look cool. You've seen funroll-loops.org, right?

I will say that the ratio of hackerness to riciness falls off pretty quickly the further from the core gentoo community one gets. By the time one is in slashdot country, it may not be 1 hacker for every 9 ricers, but it's pretty close, IMO.

I actually install Gentoo for fun!

It was my very first attempt at Linux, and it worked great. In fact the difficulty of the installation process causes me to recommend it to new users, because it forces newbies to learn the ins and outs of the system from the get-go.

As a hardcore Gentoo fanboy, I was also greatly saddened that they "sissied" the process with the fancy GTK installer.

That is all I have to say. Oh, and also:

My amp goes to 11.

Please see http://www.funroll-loops.org/ for the full scoop.

Occams Razor. The laptop broke due to a manufacturing defect. Gentoo didn't enter into it.

Whatever the Gentoo Rice boys tell you, Gentoo isn't powerful enough to kill your computer in such a spectacular fashion if you use it wrong. ;-)

Never seen it huh?

A humorous site (if you're not a gentoo user, I suppose).

Funny... I always thought Gentoo was for Ricers

You must be proud knowing that people like you are the inspiration for sites like this, and this, and this.

I predict you will have a problem right away: you will be running Gentoo.
Why gentoo is for jerks

http://funroll-loops.org/

Gentoo is for ricers!

j/k, It's a nice desktop o/s, tends to be very very up to date. I wouldn't run it on a server though, the maintainability is a nightmare... and I know-- I just left a job doing admin for about 15 gentoo machines.

You could have at least included a link or a quote:
http://funroll-loops.org/

I don't think that Debian can really compete with Gentoo. Sure it might be okay, but when it comes to dependencies, you probably are still going to have to get them all on your own. Or is there something like portage in the Debian world as well?"

whoah. Weird that I'd never seen a post about use flags from a Gentoo user until 2 days after I see http://funroll-loops.org/ =p

Why did this guy copy his comment directly from Funroll-loops ?

Really lame. I'd pen a post lamenting what Slashdot has come to these days, but that would only serve to convey an expectation of something greater, which, frankly, is just sad...

So SM posts this for shits and giggles. Fair enough. It brings the Gentoo Ricer crowd out, which is entertaining for the rest of us and generates page views ergo ad revenue. I can almost see a four steps to profit cliché here, but I'll leave that to someone else.

Seriously though, what a load of bollocks. I certainly can't claim to have the vintage of some of the 20+ years sysadmins on here, but I've been a Linux user for 7-8 years now and that is evidently long enough to come to understand the merits of package management. Yes, when you're fat and fifteen and still living in your parent['s|s'] basement with nothing better to do all day than stick it out watching makefile lines scroll by, Gentoo seems like a good idea. If you're really fucking sad, you might even notice a perceptible difference.

But fuck, please stop trolling like a bunch of Mac/Ogg/etc zealots telling the rest of us about it - we don't fucking care. We have jobs to do, partners to go home to, lives to get on with. If I did still care for Linux on my main machine, Ubuntu would have me up and running in an hour or so - I couldn't have my computer out of action for a day because it's...er...compiling.

Now don't get me wrong - I understand the mentality. I know the mentality. It's the same mentality that led me to reinstall Windows anything as frequently as once a week for a period in an attempt to get it running tip top. It's about the struggle, the fun of getting there, the war, the conflict, the strife - that's the fun part. I am of a computing generation that cut its teeth editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files with elaborate startup menu configurations to optimise memory availability for specific applications (remember expanded memory, anyone?).* And it was great - we loved it, well, some of us did - until we actually had to get some work done.

Now I have to get work done, so I use a Mac. And countless Linux sysadmins out there will say the same thing - in the real world, you have to deliver results. Real, actual results. Dependability. Not downing the server every evening for a recompile. Reliability. Actual rather than theoretical uptime. We simply don't have time to be sitting round waiting for X to build so we can just sling some graphics on the screen.

And if y'all were doing something useful with your lives, neither would you...

iqu :|

(* Kudos to John Gruber for reminding me (through quoting someone else) of the glory days of MS-DOS - choice quote: "As a PC user, enduring the grotesqueries of that experience is something that we are actually proud of.")

If the site get's /.ed, check here for more information on the performance benefits of running Gentoo.

I tried it. A fully-compiled-from-scratch gentoo box (oh jesus what a goddamn pain in the ass that was) gave me about 2-4% faster performance on a large build (lots of sh + javac). Whoopee. Totally not even close to being worth the DAYS it took me to set up. Maybe it's worth it to some people, but chances are that if your software running 3% faster is worth days of your time, you've already optimized it out the wazoo.

And it's been posted before, but http://funroll-loops.org./

ps: you can make Debian do the same thing, you just don't have the USE flags.

Obligatory:

funroll-loops.org

Obligatory: http://funroll-loops.org/

I'm not even smart enough to get Gentoo booting off my PC! :(

Gentoo should not be considered a sign of intelligent life.

If you're your new to Linux, I'd opt for trying both Unbuntu and Fedora Core, to get a feel for RPM and DPKG based environments). Once your done with that I'd maybe try something like FreeBSD (which is where Gentoo's 'ports' system came from anyway - though there are two primary ways to manage software in FreeBSD).

After that I'd skip Gentoo and just try installing Linux - or better yet something a bit more different like HURD - yourself from scratch (such as from a minimal bootdisk) to get a good overall feel for different platforms (if that sort of thing interests you).

IMO, the purpose of Gentoo is largely for people who (a) like FreeBSD but would rather have a Linux kernel and/or (b) don't grok the point of full package management systems (c) SlackWare fetishists looking for a 'bit on the side' and of course (d) ricers! [1]

[1] Some of my best friends are Gentoo users.[2]
[2] It used to be worse, they used to be FreeBSD users.[3]
[3] I'll stop now before I get modded to -10 ;-)

Here you go: http://funroll-loops.org/. In short, it's not that emerge lets you specify options, it's all the cluebats screaming about how awesomely fast -O9 is.

    - rustytaco

OS X ... which is of course free and has trustworthy binaries!

http://funroll-loops.org/

Not only did he fail to mention Gentoo but he also failed to mention compile flags which is like -LONG_MAX to his credibility. Now if you will excuse me I need to emerge -u world...

I think all of you might find it's like:

There was a shop, opened by a bunch of cooks, where you could buy a complete 5-course dinner. The dinner was served with the shop's own special dinnerware and cutlery; the dinnerware couldn't be served on standard plates or eaten with standard silverware. The shop's thinking of switching to standard porcelain and glass for their dinnerware, and standard stainless steel for their cutlery, but it'll still have to be made specially.

The ingredients, and recipes, for the mashed potatoes and vegetables for the main course is available from the shop, for free. You can't get the recipes or special for the salad, the dessert, the appetizers, or the meat or fish in the main course, however.

They offered to give the kids free dinners.

There's also a large shopping hall in the same town, with shops that offer food in a number of ways:

• a complete dinner, on standard plates, with standard silverware;
• a complete dinner - you bring your own plates in, and they'll serve it;
• sandwiches, for those with special small plates who have to eat while they're traveling or working;
• catered meals for large events;

etc..

Some parts of the meals there are cooked by professional cooks, some are cooked by people in the town. The shops gather the courses together and serve them. You can get a "pre-packaged" meal, or you can order different courses off the menu and have them put them together - or you can just order the "give me everything on the menu" package and decide what you want to have.

For the full 5-course meals, you can get several different styles, from styles that are, at least to some degree, as fancy as those in the first store, to other simpler styles that some consider better for that simplicity and others consider a bit, well, unpolished.

I.e., tastes vary - some consider the courses from the shopping hall almost as good as - or, for some, as good as or better than - what you can get at the first store. Others think they're OK, but just not as well done. Some say that the first store does a better job of making sure all the courses work well together, as they're all prepared by the same people - although some of them are actually taken from the same places that stock the shelves in the shopping hall.

Ingredients and recipes for all of the dishes available for the shopping hall are available for free.

Some people argue that it's a good thing that you can get the recipes, although, in practice, a lot of customers just want dinner made for them, and the recipe doesn't matter. At least some of them think the chefs at the first store do a better job of making a dinner than do the collection of people who prepare stuff at the shopping hall. Others find that the stuff served both at the first store and in the shopping hall isn't quite right for them - doesn't taste right, has ingredients to which they're allergic, etc. - and are happy that they can get the recipes for the stuff in the shopping hall and cook it the way they want.

Some of the customers at the shopping hall think that if you don't buy the raw ingredients and recipes and cook them yourself, you're really not using the shopping hall the way you should be; those people tend to like rice dishes.

You can get the raw ingredients, and pots and pans and cooking utensils, at the shopping hall - but the other store does, at least, give away some ingredients, and their own special line of pots and pans and cooking utensils (although some of the pots look more than a bit like the ones you can get at the shopping hall, just as is the case for some of the ingredients you can get). You can even get equipment and seed to grow vegetables at the shopping hall, but most people don't go that far.

Oh, and the first store uses special glass to make the glasses, from which they can't make wine glasses, so they don't offer wine with their meals. (Th

Or it could be they don't believe in VTEC stickers...

Reminds me of :
Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here

Teh LATENCIES MAKE ALL THE DIFFernence I run with my uber memory timings on my gentoo system => http://funroll-loops.org/

Of course Gentoo! Because everyone knows that production servers need to run really fast. You don't get that with generic binaries.

sir, you obviously didn't pick the right distro, see http://funroll-loops.org/ for a system that will suit your needs

http://www.funroll-loops.org/

My problem now? Spending absurd amounts of money modding the hell out of my MythTV box. I bought one of those dedicated Media PC cases, and am going crazy installing lighted pushbutton switches, rewiring my PSU to be like an XConnect, running neon lights all over the place, soundproofing the heck out of the machine. I've spent almost $2k on this box!...

Of course he is.

Apropos.

LOL, I guess the saying that GUIs aren't always newbie friendly really does have some truth to it.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/installer/scr eenshots/gtk_makedotconf.png

http://funroll-loops.org/

Sorry, but your post looks like something right out of http://funroll-loops.org/ :) I love gentoo as well, however, having a way to *quickly* get the system installed is something that I like. If I'm sitting in a colo upgrading my server (in this case, from debian to gentoo), sitting and going through the manual procedure sucks. I want to stick a CD in, click a few buttons, and end up at the same point that I was at after the by-hand install process. Of course, linux is all about choice, so I'm sure that you can have your text install while others have their graphical install.

No offense, but just because you followed the directions in the install guide doesn't mean you're now a linux guru :)

The only MAJOR difference between RedHat RPM and Debian .deb/apt-get is merely the distributions they work with. They are both package management systems that keep a database of the software and corresponding dependencies installed on your system, and handle automated binary installation of said packages for their respective distros (as opposed to installation by compiling source code).

As for ricers...have a look at funroll-loops.org

I'm going to have to disagree. Granted there are some Linux users who are obsessed with fine tuning the intricate details of their box in order to crank the greatest "performance" out of it. These are the young, sometimes obnoxious fanboys. You'll hear from them more often than you'll hear from the person whose choice of Linux is largely a pragmatic and a political one.

Yay, electronic ricers

This post is definitely off topic, as these are electronic ricers, not people who hack their DVD player into something different.

Isn't that one of the signs of the end in Revelations? I mean, sure, we could blithely count on the fact that two such camps of fanatic idiots would mutually repel each other, but just think of the horrible repercussions if there was even one crossover!!!

It's all because Gentoo is for Ricers. :)

I'm just a little fuzzy on the advantage gained by compiling it yourself instead of just installing it. I mean, what advantage did you get by those 24 hours of compilation. Pulling down a debian install (or some other distribution) does the same damned thing, without actually compiling it yourself. And debian will install-on-demand with dependencies, as will (I'm sure) any other modern distribution. What's your point?

Gentoo just seems... silly to me, for most applications.

--grendel drago

Why do we care what mail client or webserver you use?
Rice is not the solution to everything. You're illustrating my point - more is not always more.
Just use decent DNS servers, like the AC above has mentioned.

Smart move IMO. Don't forget Gentoo is for ricers!. Seriously though, I love Gentoo users, they're funny.

Personally, I'd rather install a GNU tool chain on a FreeBSD, Solaris or Mac OS X box and cross compile a network enabled kernel, a shell, some core utilities and then just download anything else I need from the appropriate location than ever again waste time with the retarded horror that is Gentoo and it's 'non-installer'.

It's as if whoever came up with their recommended 'install proceedure' did it specifically in ways designed to utterly waste your time. Due to largely pointless overhead the whole install proceedure and portage system is markedly less efficent than using curl to pull down packages from a local gnu.org mirror alone, in so far as man hours required to actually achive the objective of getting a system that does what you want it to do, IME.

At some point, the penny will hopefully drop and someone will realise the the vast majority of the installation process can in fact (if they had a clue) be automated and wrapped in, at worst, an ncurses display, and that having the end user manually piss about untar'ing files makes the likes of Slackware and MkLinux (circa 1995) seem /polished/.

It's there already.
It's the 7th quote down on this page.

It's there already.
It's the 7th quote down on this page.

Too bad they're going graphical, because "Watching all this shit go by makes me a Unix genius."

Also curious about this post is the use of "notorious." Threw me a bit; was this a positive or negative post?

notorious: Known widely and usually unfavorably; infamous: a notorious gangster; a district notorious for vice.