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I already updated my installation 4 hours ago, the FreeBSD folk are fast :)

I already updated my installation 4 hours ago, the FreeBSD folk are fast :)

How many machines do you have? You may want to consider openMosix. Gentoo Linux has an already patched openMosix kernel. You could build your self a fully optimized divx encoding cluster. It may be worth the trouble, I'm sure with some googling you would be able to find all the tools you need.

/* end shameless plug */

But notice he doesn't say which is which!

(Clearly the good one is here! :)

I have since switched to Gentoo Linux for my personal workstations. IMHO, Gentoo beats FreeBSD at its own game, in three ways:

• The Gentoo base system is even more streamlined and minimal than FreeBSD's. For instance, the FreeBSD base includes sendmail, tcsh, a real sh, uucp, and inetd (among others). These are optional in Gentoo, and I prefer that, since I don't need those packages.
• The Gentoo Portage system is like FreeBSD's /usr/ports, only better. They feel very similar, but Portage is simply more featureful. I like Portage's USE flags, though I wish they weren't limited to on/off boolean values. The way Portage integrates packages with the base OS is also rather clean, though I am also a big fan of the FreeBSD "ports go in /usr/local" method as well.
• Gentoo is somewhat more cutting-edge than FreeBSD. If I want to use bash instead of sh, metalog instead of syslog, vcron instead of cron, postfix instead of sendmail, cups instead of lpd, etc., I can, and without munging up the base system. And a pet peeve: FreeBSD only recently moved from more(1) to less(1).

I have seen Linux panic thrice (way back in 1997). I've only seen FreeBSD panic once. They are both wonderful OSes. If only I had the time to run them both. Right now Gentoo gets my time.

and the Poll

There is a thread in the Gentoo forums about this.

I was so scared, I soiled myself. Now excuse me while I go change my armor....

Just in case anyone's really confused:
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20030401-newslet ter.xml

Actually I just switched from Gentoo to Debian on my main PC (a laptop with PIII Celeron 700MHz with 198MB ram). I was using Gentoo for a year now and just installed Debian on other less frequently used machines but now switched completly to Debian.

Basically in Gentoo I was sick of:

• having to wait 10 min to rsync portage plus other 10min to rebuild its huge cache
• using a broken kernel (the last drop was when I read that during a whole month the kernel wasn't obeying to the process priorities! See for your self in its CVS)
• having to wait 3 minutes just to get the list of the installed packages!!
• most times a new version of a library was out the packages that depend on it got broken and have to be manually recompiled
• many packages I need couldn't be found on portage (I did contribute ebuilds many times, but it usually takes too long to get accepted)
• closed developer community (the development mailing list isn't open - no, gentoo-dev is for experienced users, and not even that nowadays, since almost everybody uses the web forum or IRC and I have no time for that)
• over the time alot of things fail to work properly and you basically feel that you should emerge world to get a fresh restart but that would take ages and sounds like reinstalling Windows...

The most surprising thing was that with Debian:

• the computer got snapier - lower memory footprint
• I could find almost all packages I need, even the lastest: if not on debian unstable, on unofficial apt repositories
• apt and the debian mirror system is a really well thought and evolved system - download/query everythin is fast and efficient
• kernels and kernel modules (especially ALSA) are so beautifuly handled with make-kpkg
• I still can easily compile the performance critical applications from source to get the best of the processor capabilities

I know my computer isn't the fastest out there, but while the timings may vary, the scalability problems with portage are still there, so it's just a matter of time until faster computers start experience the same delays.

Anyway, this is also reflection of my interests and my experience. When I started with Linux I wanted RedHat because it was the most familiar to everybody else. I switched to Gentoo because I wanted more and latest stuff which I couldn't easily find on RedHat (RPM hell!), and I wouldn't mind if things got broken as I could usually help sorting everything out. But now my interests are narrowing down, and I still want the latest stuff, but I just don't want that to get in the way of my daily work.

Is there really a *significant* increase in speed to justify the hours in CPU time to recompile everything with unrolling loops and athlon-tbird or whatever specific code?

Yes if 19% is significant enough for you. :)

Quote from the link:

vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
gcc version 3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)

Result: '-O3 -march=athlon-mp -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -fforce-mem -s -funroll-loops -frerun-loop-opt -fdelete-null-pointer-checks -fprefetch-loop-arrays -ffast-math -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fschedule-insns'

Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 19.6%

Warning: read my warning in the post before using these flags

Of course, you need to justify the time taken to benchmark individual optimization flag to yield such a result. It took me a day to obtain a optimal CFLAG and another week to fully optimize a system. :)

Older processors gain less performance boost over source optimization. I've little problem boosting a newer box to 19% and beyond.(compare to normal -O3 compilation).

There're few stability issues(if you'd take my warning down my post), but it's still good for desktop processing(games!). For servers I would not risk it and use some other binary-distro instead.

Of course, it's up to you. If you think you need extra performance boost for your production servers and you've management justification and you've given enough resources to test, why not. :)

It's not just the GCC optimization flags, it's total customization. Gentoo (my distro of choice and the most popular source-based Linux distro) also has USE flags, which allow you to compile programs with or without support for various things. If some app supports both KDE and Gnome, normally support for both would be compiled in, even though most users would only use one or the other. In Gentoo you have USE flags for KDE and Gnome, as well as a myriad of others. If you don't want KDE support compiled into apps, stick -kde in USE. Likewise with -gnome. Or put both in if you only use a more minimalist WM. Or -X if you're putting together a headless server, etc etc.

Granted, it's not quite the same league as using Knoppix as a Debian installer, but you can use Knoppix to install Gentoo Linux as well, so you can actually use your PC while compiling stuff, instead of having it useless for a couple of days. Pretty sweet, I must say.

See here for details.

Usually people suggest you to switch to postfix, qmail and courier - all three are open source as well.

I'll add that Courier's major developer is a very arrogant persont ignoring real life things and that gives you a quite good MTA with no support whatsoever.

The major complain of Qmail users (acrttually admins) is very similar: the major developer is concentratied on revolutionary new version of his program, so no big improvement or serious bug fixes for about two years in the current release.

As for Postfix, I love it's flexibility "up and down" - it's extremely easy to configure a home-based mail server as well as a corporate distributed mail system. It has very clear design and bery simle (still power!) config syntax. Development is not frozen, so are the developers. Besides, it's still has a support for both mailbox formats.

Few surveys and polls (one of them) I did demonstrate the trend that most of former sendmail users switch namely to Postfix. No need to mention that most of MTA switchers are moving from sendmail :)

people who want to use sendmail will keep using it

The good news is that most of people do not want to use sendmail. Thay want to use MTA. Therefore, when they think about alternatives, they may notice that sendmail is not the only opensource MTA. And it is not the best one. That's why there is growing stream of MTA switchers.

But it is not a bad news. It's a challenge for sendmail developers. Now they have to either redesign their child or to choose another open source project where to develop further their own skills. Either is choice is good afterall.

Painless! :-)

This is why people need to switch over to Gentoo Linux, it's so much easier than RedHat, Debian, and OpenDarwin.

You're right, it is so much easier to go through the process of
configuring and compiling the entire system from the command-line than it is to point and click through an installer that auto-detects everything and gives you a desktop right out of the box. Tell me with a straight face that you would recommend Gentoo to a novice friend before RedHat.

By always compiling locally, the apps on your machine are optimized the platform they run on, rather than the lowest common denominator.

An oft-repeated claim made by people who are never able to produce any evidence that it matters. But they swear up and down that it feels faster. I wonder if you also mark up all your CDs with green pen because it sounds so much better.

The kinds of applications that really benefit from this kind of arch-specific optimization are often available in several forms, one for each major arch.

This helps Sun as very few apps are compiled for Sparc architectures when distributed, so leveraging Gentoo this way will really help them.

Every single package in Debian is compiled for SPARC (provided it will actually compile successfully). There are more Debian packages than Gentoo ebuilds.

Thanks - I'll try that.

Also, someone mentioned here that the font problems with OO.o should be fixed in 1.1.

I'm still waiting for 1.4 - Gentoo

With no PR build-up, and no listing of new features on RedHat's website (can anyone else find any, because I certainly can't!) this release certainly looks like a bad joke, and if it's not an April Fools then it makes Red Hat look like a bad joke.

I'm using 8.0 now, and RH's games with registration and update-systems combined with their ridiculous "BlueCurve" rebranding (I'm sorry, but it just takes RH even farther away from any sort of standard, and forces it's users to go to RH for software updates), combine to make Red Hat look un-professional. Why should I buy any of their software, if they're just going to come out with a new major version months later and leave me in the dust?

I mean really, what warrents this? Is there a brand new Kernel major version that I've somehow missed hearing about? Does RH have the inside on a new blazingly fast XFree86? If this is serious it's a ridiculous marketing game, and if it's a joke it's wholly unprofessional!

As soon as I've time it's back to the source and on to Gentoo for me!

Many (if not most) of Gentoo users use those versions for weeks. Check the official statistics. I've upgraded those packages for more than a month. Some - even more time ago.

One of strong arguments of Slackware is compiling from tarballs in order to upgrade your packages (or reinstalling from new ISO). Perhaps, compiling from tarballs manually by all users until the new ISO arrives is not the way to create a good collaboration against those tarball bugs.

Gentoo Portage is that collaboration tool, infrastructure and athmosphere. It saves the knowledge of the collective, of those who has already spent time for manually debugging default tarballs (and created/updated ebuilds for them), and brings that knowledge to those who is spending their time on other tarballs (and creating/updating ebuilds for them). Besides, nobody waits new ISO unless new computer installation is required - all installations are evolving accordingly to the chosen profile.

I've been using Slackware (and RH) for years (since 1995) until last year I've converted to Gentoo, which is like a drag for me now: I am addicted to Gentoo and there is no way I am going back to neither Slackware or RH.

Slackware users, sooner or later you will be assimilated. The resistence is futile. See Gentoo (sorry, last paragraph is a silly joke, but I could not resist myself for it).

Many (if not most) of Gentoo users use those versions for weeks. Check the official statistics. I've upgraded those packages for more than a month. Some - even more time ago.

One of strong arguments of Slackware is compiling from tarballs in order to upgrade your packages (or reinstalling from new ISO). Perhaps, compiling from tarballs manually by all users until the new ISO arrives is not the way to create a good collaboration against those tarball bugs.

Gentoo Portage is that collaboration tool, infrastructure and athmosphere. It saves the knowledge of the collective, of those who has already spent time for manually debugging default tarballs (and created/updated ebuilds for them), and brings that knowledge to those who is spending their time on other tarballs (and creating/updating ebuilds for them). Besides, nobody waits new ISO unless new computer installation is required - all installations are evolving accordingly to the chosen profile.

I've been using Slackware (and RH) for years (since 1995) until last year I've converted to Gentoo, which is like a drag for me now: I am addicted to Gentoo and there is no way I am going back to neither Slackware or RH.

Slackware users, sooner or later you will be assimilated. The resistence is futile. See Gentoo (sorry, last paragraph is a silly joke, but I could not resist myself for it).

"Why do I suddenly want to reformat and install linux"

Do it! Gentoo Linux

Seriously, Gentoo forums are ones of the friendliest open-source communities. I don't remember if anyone answered to anyone with RTFM. It gives me the hope that it is not true that "the gripe will go from MS to RTFM".

As for Bugzilla's etiquette, it's a good document: short, clear, not intimidating. I don't see anything wrong with this document.

Ahh there you go ! It was a big tux... Good to see that I am not dreaming, however, I haven't tested it and I can't tell if it's true or not!

Or: emerge package-name

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

I wish I had read this article before I began installing Gentoo on the only device I have with a TV tuner! Sigh... I guess there's always P2P. :-/

Jeez, he's 50 already? That last pictures I saw of him made him look relatively young.

You're kidding, right? He's looked like 50 for 25 years at least.

Anyways, how about for his birthday, we try to get HURD done sometime before the guy dies? Huh?

After you, Sir.

Btw, RMS, I'm going to pronounce it G N U Linux, not Geenoo Linux, which sounds wierd.

How about making it Gentoo Linux instead? I can't recall anybody starting a flamewar about that.

Unfortunately, if you use a distribution like Gentoo, you are also a acne-ridden, pear-shaped, no-life loser nerd with no sexual future.

If you use a source-based distribution, like Gentoo, everything in your system will be compiled for your 64-bit architecture when it's installed. You'll be able to take advantage of your new 64-bit architecture right from the get-go.

If you're looking to try out SuSE and are a very busy, download the live-eval ISO image. Burn it, boot, and run from CD. No need to struggle with scripts, partitions or file systems.

BTW, if you absulutely need the latest, you may want to consider a source distribution like gentoo. These are usually the most up-to-date distros with the latest goods.

And curiously, if (KDE 3.1 rulez), why SuSE? 8.2 will be the first SuSE release with KDE 3.1. The current release, SuSE 8.1, ships with KDE 3.0.3. I suppose you could update to KDE 3.1 after installing. But then again, you could do that with any distribution (read: one that you are familiar with).

Do what I do. I buy the "Personal" version, so SuSE gets a little $ back, and I install everything else that I need from either a)the source or b)SuSE Pro RPMs from ftp.suse.com.

I've been using SuSE Pro releases but 8.1 really started to annoy me by insisting that I install a bunch of stuff I didn't want or risk "system inconsistancies." Damn it, if I wanted KDE w/o CUPS, let me. Geez!

However, I've taken a liking to Gentoo these days.

I just hope they'll continue to release community editions ala Redhat8...

I did it by installing everything GNOME in /usr/local/stow/gnome. I didn't get any trouble, but then I didn't have that very many packages linking to it.

However, I agree that a real package manager is better for this kind of task.

Nowadays I run Gentoo, and don't use stow at all (actually, I don't have a single file /usr/local). I have found that making ebuilds are almost as comfortable when installing and much more comfortable when upgrading a package, since I don't have to manually go through the install process every time. Mostly, I actually just have to rename the .ebuild-file, and emerge fetches and builds the package for me by a single command.

A quick search through the Gentoo forums revealed this thread. It would appear the quick answer is "yes". Give it a read if you are still interested.

It even has a great /etc/env system for managing environment variables (both bash and csh flavors), so if it needs to install binaries in a non-standard location, you "PATH" is automatically updated to include it.

I don't use Gentoo as a desktop platform, so I can't comment on its X/KDE/Gnome setups, but I'm sure they're just as complete and easy. And although Gentoo may be rather intimidating for a n00b initially, it does have excellent documentation and a great support community at their site.

Keeping a system up-to-date with the latest and greatest has never been this easy!

The real answer isn't stow, it's gentoo. Sure you could spend time trying to manage packages. Or you could just use a distro that source compiles everything, manages your packages, and lets you write really simple scripts to contribute back. Of course maybe that's just why I run it.

Does this mean that Debian will switch to the 2.2 kernel within the next 3 years?

Of-course I am just kidding... But on a serious note, give Gentoo a try. They get the new kernels into portage before the post is made on Fresh^H^H^H^H^HSlashdot.

I just upgraded to 2.5.64 with Linus's patch ( mentioned yesterday) merged in.

I am running Gentoo and I first installed the gentoo-optimized 2.4.20 kernel. When I read the article yesterday I decided to make the jump to 2.5.64 + patch. Holy wow, Batman.

I'm running Gentoo under VMware on a dual 2.2 GHz Xeon (only 1 processor makes it through to the virtual machine, though). After figuring out that I needed new modutils, I had everything up and running. I started up a kernel compile with make -j 2 to really try and saturate the system, and moved the mouse around. The mouse was silky smooth, KDE quickly and properly recognized mouse-overs and everything was just so nice. I then booted back to 2.4.20 and ran the same test. Oh the pain! The mouse was chunky, KDE didn't even try and do mouseover animations.. it was horrible. I've switched grub to default to the 2.5 kernel and I'm not going back.

That said, this is a play machine and does nothing important. So if it crashes more often (no crashes yet), then it doesn't really bother me..

Agreed.
Hire a good sysadmin and the job will get done much better and faster.
Itanium also doesn't sound like the way to go for you.
Think about it. Hammer is going to be out in a few weeks which will give you better 64-bit & 32-bit performance than the itanium for a fraction of the price. It's not the solution for everyone, but for you.. it sounds like it.
Now about redhat... You could consider other distros as well like Gentoo which give you added benefits like better package management especially if you are going to have a lot of your own source around. You can write ebuilds for them and easily install your source packages on all your machines. It could also give you a nice performance benefit.
But the distro might best be picked by the sysadmin you hire. (who needs to be a specialist in linux, but maybe not already tied down to a specific distribution)

Maybe some people have, but not me. Some distributions have decent package managers.

From what I've seen, Gentoo already has.

CFLAGS="-march=i686

Switch to Gentoo! 'Nuf said.

Gentoo is a little complex to set up, but they have EXCELLENT step by step user guides for getting everything on your system working...audio, 3d acceleration, USB, everything. The people on the support forums are superb, and I have never seen a more helpful bunch.
Gentoo is what I learned on. When you're done setting up a gentoo system, you know exactly what you have on your system and WHY it's there.

Join team gentoo.

I use Gentoo and with a patch from Con Kolivas I have ALSA compiled into my kernel, works like a charm only took a few minutes in addition to the time it took to recompile the kernel.

I use my Gentoo Linux Install CD for this kind of work.

> this puts GNOME's market share at ~ 43.5% and KDE's at ~ 29%.

Trying to deduct the desktop's market share from distribution share is ridiculous. If a distribution ships both why do you assume that the default is used? Btw, can you name a single only-Gnome included distribution? Compare that to the available only-KDE included distributions. You assume every Debian user prefers Gnome which according to this poll is not the case. You assume that RedHat is used as desktop system, but perhaps it's primary used for the 40% non-workstation system and has no desktop environment installed at all? You can't tell unless your statistic counts the desktop environments like the Gentoo user statistics where KDE leads.