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Gentoo Linux 1.2
MrOutlander writes "Gentoo Linux releases version 1.2 of their cutting edge distribution with many updates including KDE 3.0.1 (20020604) and GNOME 2 (beta, 20020607) support. I love emerge :)"
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What exactly is cutting edge about this distribution? What does this have that no other distribution has, that is light-years ahead?
After being a fanatical Debian-user for four years, Gentoo was a "love at first sight".. :) I've been running Gentoo for about a year now and always when I find out about a new detail about it, I think to myself "Yes, this is how it SHOULD have been in the other distros also"..
The only thing I'm missing is a way to make "recursive" library updates.. For example, if I upgrade libSDL to a new version, all apps that depends on SDL should be recompiled automatically.. There is still no easy way to do this in Gentoo, but I heard that it is comming in portage v2...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Gentoo 1.2 was released on June 10. This is one of the top 10 Linux distributions, and one of the few Linux distributions that generates any excitement anymore. Does Slashdot care at all about being current? My understanding is that this is a Linux website (I have come to this understanding from reading postings about minor kernel patches etc.). Perhaps it would be well to keep up on Linux news.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
While Gentoo does rock, I don't suggest any of the cutting edge stuff for production boxes. While that's a given for the most part, the ease with which Gentoo allows you to install new and tempting things may make it harder for some to resist. (Emerge just rules.)
;) ).
Installing Gnome2 and then Evolution left me with no X/Window Manager (or, rather, Gnome 1.4 and Gnome2 at the same time). The machine I did this on is one I use to fool around with, but in a production environment, I suggest avoiding the temptations Gentoo puts before you and sticking with the tried and true (ie, Gnome 1.4 if you like Gnome, and whatever the stable version of KDE is
libertarianswag.com
A simple WHOIS shows that it's registered to some Belgian dude. Why should we think anything on there is even credible (I mean did you even read it???)
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
I've been using Gentoo for the last couple months and I have to say that Gentoo has really restored the sense of wonder I had when I set up my first install of Slackware years ago. I was skeptical at first but Gentoo has so totally won me over that I can't imagine going back to anything else. I think if Gentoo ever failed I would probably go to something like BSD now.
Gentoo probably isn't really a newbie distro since it has no automatic installation or setup, but then again I know some people have been able to manage it on only some limited experience from Redhat or Mandrake. It really makes you understand how your system is set up and works to a degree that most of the package based distros don't but also feels far "cleaner" than Slack (my previous favorite) or LFS. I've learned more about Linux in a couple months of Gentoo than in a year of Redhat, and I'm happier with my setup and customization than I ever have been before.
Also, Gentoo is FAST. I run it on a somewhat older laptop (Celery 500, 128 MB) and though the compiles do take quite some time for large packages like KDE and X, the system really does have a much faster "feel" to it than in other distros. I don't have any hard data on it but the speed increase was enough to be quite noticable going from Redhat.
Anyway, I've been 99% satisfied with Gentoo and I'd recommend it to anyone with a little Linux experience (though definitely not as a server distro) who wants to have fun with a desktop Linux setup. Now if I could only tear myself away from tinkering with my Gentoo and find time to work ;)
I found the full information by going to the Debian site, clicking on "search" and typing in "upgrading". I found the Upgrading a distribution page which details it.
Short answer: apt-get is your friend.
Gentoo Linux or for that matter all source derived distributions cost a lot of time waiting for a compile and a lot of energy hours of CPU usage for compilation.
This will increase the greenhouse effect and melt the icecaps. Then the only gentoo surviving will be those in zoos and those on harddisks.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Doesn't naming a Linux distro after a religion violate some sort of public license?
(it could be that I really am that stupid)
One of the attractive features to me is that everything is built from source and optimised for the machine it is running on. The reason this is attractive is because I have a number of older machines which I want to "squeeze" as much as I can from.
However, being older machines some do not have cdrom drives, only floppy drives and network connections. Given that most of the gentoo install is done on the network anyway, it's a shame the install discs provided are only cdroms.
If anyone has a "HOWTO install gentoo from floppy" I would be happy to know about it.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Gentoo's great, if you have a Pentium-or-better machine (for the partially-built distro) and a bootable CD-ROM. Don't even bother if you can't boot from CD, and good luck if you try to do a "live" install from an existing Linux installation. A good alternative is LFS, which accomplishes much of what Gentoo has set out to accomplish but without all of the superfluous extras. More importantly, LFS is meant to be built using an existing (if possibly broken) Linux platform. If building a Linux system from scratch is what you're looking for, LFS certainly delivers.
I've been using Gentoo since Slashdot's last story on them, and I have had nothing but good experiences. The portage system has made my system noticeably faster, since my binaries finally are not optimized for a 386. The ease of applying my own patches on top of the normal package source is also a major selling point. The nice people at Gentoo even added the driver for my printer to Ghostscript's source, something I used to have to do by hand.
But the coolest feature (besides portage) is the beautiful init script infrastructure. The init scripts are the prettiest of any I've seen so far, and also the easiest to modify. Having all the configuration files in plain-text is a very nice thing.
Sorry if this is redunant, because I'm sure everyone already knows that GENTOO IS GREAT!
Actually it's not that hard.. You just need to have a boot disk that will allow you network support and some file transfer protocol. tomsrtbt and mulinux come to mind.
Instructions:
Mount the CD on some computer with a cd-rom and network support.
Follow boot disk instructions to get the computer that Gentoo Linux is going to be installed on running and the network up.
Look at Normal Instructions and Skip steps 1 - 5; Follow step 6 (partitions) and 7 (mounting); skip 8; and for step 9, instead of copying from cd-rom, copy stages from the network (using whatever protocol meets your fancy); then continue on with the rest of the instructions.
This isn't meant to be trolling ...
With the previous discussion whether source based distros or binary distros are better I wonder, why you can't simply download a binary distro and recompile all important packages from the Source RPMS. So you can get the comfort from e.g. Mandrake with the efficiency of e.g. Gentoo.
Is it a possible way to enhance a binary based distibution with a recompilation feature?
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
I think that Gentoo is reasonably secure "out of the box" because it doesn't automatically setup ANY network programs or daemons. Nothing is activated until you explicitly set it up. The problem comes when you start to set things up...Gentoo will not be secure for long if you don't do a good job of configuring everything. But then again that's going to be a problem with any Linux distro and at least Gentoo probably isn't quite as easy to root right after install as some other distros.
"You may even try Sid the Unstable version if you want the latest and the greatest software"
Yeah, like KDE3 and Xfree 4.2. No, wait...
It's been over 2 months since KDE3 was released. How about having it FINALLY in Debian as well?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I saw Gentoo a while ago and thought i would giving it a try, boasting an excellent portage system and a tiny initial download. The portage system is the best i have found, even compared to the FBSD Ports its is, i think, by far superior, giving you an interface very similar to apt-get and dpkg to install the ports. The install, even though time-consuming, is actually very straight forwards, whter beginner, experienced admin, or hardened guru, you will get along with it just fine. Everything is compiled from source, so true enough, its not really suited to a slow machine. Unless your a very patient person, or its designed to be a server. However even though i think binary packages might be a good idea for those who dont want to compile, the system becomes extremely fast due to optimizations in the compile process. The website is comprehensive and the people at Gentoo exceptionally happy to help you out. if you find it hard to get an answer then let me know! ill help you! The bleeding edge software that theyre happy to supply, and the very latest in everything is an extreme advantage when coming form a debian backgroud. finally you dont have things breaking, and you dont have to trapes around looking for latest updates or debs. just emerge rsync, and get the latest one! Gnome2 is exceptionally nice! :)
But i guess you guys should try it out for yourself.
im sure you wont be dissapointed
Great idea, why won't you help Debian folks if you need it so much?
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
Given that the penguin has a latin name, should the full name of this distro be:
Connochaetes taurinus/Pygoscelis papua Linus ?
Is the fact that the issue is one of control, not source-v-binary. In this case you suggest, the question would be, 'Which packages are important?'
If you want a desktop, you will have different needs to desiring a server. You will want eye-candy. So who decides what the important packages are?
Policy dictates, if you use Debian. Something or other, if you use Red Hat or Mandrake. Gentoo and LFS put the control in your hands.
Doing what you suggest can be done, but the question of control then comes up. Either you trust others to know their Linux (binary), or you dig yourself and come up with the goods (source).
For me, it's Debian unstable. I don't have time to look at recompiling all the source for any machine at the moment, though I won't rule it out. And I have no problem whatsoever following what the Debian Project recommends as the results have been nearly perfect thus far.
It really depends on what you want to do.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
It seems that Gentoo was a south african word, used as an international term for a 'prostitute'. I just wonder whether it is an appropriate word-relationship for a linux distribution. I mean, you get linux for free rather than pay for it.
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...."
Nimheil
rpm --rebuild
heh, I did this with redhat over the years and while it can be done, it just doesn't seem natural. Tarballs are easy to work with if a person likes to have the source as a quick reference to why things work. Having a source tree available is like having the most comprehensive man pages if I want to know the most obscure details.
With a source based distribution, the temptation to tinker and try interesting hacks out is overwhelming. Gentoo provides an environment that is friendly for making changes if one wants control how far across the system modifications will reach. I don't see how it would be possible for rpm --rebuild to recompile just the system or selected parts of the world, while emerge makes this easy.
hmmm the article said I love Emerge ?
I tried Emerging love but nothing happend.
Gentoo has a thing called "profiles". If you change the profile from "default-1.0" to "default-1.0-gcc3", everything will be built with GCC 3.1. The ebuilds will install gcc3-specific patches if they are needed.. /usr/portage/profiles/default-1.0-gcc3 /etc/ma ke.profile
# ln -sf
Using profiles, you can also make company-specific distros and other specialized versions of Gentoo...
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
I've never heard of this, I must have missed the last slashdot article on it.
On their web site they suggest buying a cd from:
http://www.tuxcds.com/
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The article doesn't mention Gentoo/Linux is now available also on Sparc, PPC and a MIPS port is also underway.
They say their distribution is geared at power users. That being the case, most of their user base will be installing on higher end machines, IMO. If you are looking to install on a lower than Pentium Pro, this may not be the best distribution for you anyway. Plenty of other distributions are compiled for i386.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I have a question for anyone who uses this.
Is there measurable speed increase by using this distribution, or do you really just save a couple microseconds here and there?
I would like to consider myself a fairly experienced linux user. I have done my fair share of deep digging into my first pre kernel2.0 slackware system through my curent one. May it be worth my time to attempt to convert my RedHat 7.2 Dell lAttitude C800 to this? I use it for java development (IDEA rocks!), and related web work.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I am a former FreeBSD user who installed Gentoo Linux after reading about it on Slashdot a couple of months ago. I am still amazed how well it is designed and documented! If you don't believe me, just go to here and have a look. I now have a fully operational (sound, video - everything works!) desktop system which is far better than any *BSD system could deliver. I have learned to enjoy the sheer speed and performace I get when I use Gentoo Linux. Native NVidia video drivers and ALSA sound makes my desktop experience enjoyable. Perhaps the most coolest thing about Gentoo is the portage system, which is a nail in FreeBSD's coffin. It is the most advanced ports system you will find in the whole world.
I'm running KDE 3.0 on Debian, I grabbed binary packages with apt. Add these lines to your sources.list:
./
deb http://kde3.geniussystems.net/debian /
deb http://people.debian.org/~bab/kde3
Also, check out the debian-kde mailing list at lists.debian.org for the latest and greatest. Once woody is released (and it's SOOO close) you'll get KDE 3.0.1 and XFree 4.2 in unstable.
Quite possibly the best feature is the ability to update critical packages with a single command. When the latest OpenSSH hole was discovered, the Gentoo developers had a new ebuild package up on their rsync mirrors within a few hours . All it took on my Gentoo boxes was a simple:And it was done. My collegues on their HP-UX boxes were spending their day looking for patches from HP's site while I was back relaxing a reading
-brain
The 1.3b_test just went online for download yesterday morning. It blows 1.2 away - completely based on gcc3.1 for a sweet performance increase. 1.2 is based on gcc2.95.
;o)"
From the changelog:
"The 1.3 series is meant to get Gentoo ready for total world domination with Gentoo 1.4
I haven't had many compile issues with it yet - this is a distro to watch out for.
In gentoo you can do an emerge --update system and emerge --update world, to update your system to the latest version. It uses emerge to install new packages (+dependencies) as well. In effect it kind of works like apt-get in debian, with the addition that it compiles the packages from source. All in all a much more flexible tool than up2date.
Insert nifty comment here
Well, I'm a FreeBSD user, and the ports system lives by that method. portupgrade -raP recompiles every updated port on your system. True, recompiling mAY be slower, but with a cronjob it's done automatically. Stripped binaries and tuned to my exact specifications is a dream
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
If you already have gentoo installed, there's no need to reinstall. Just do (as root) emerge rsync; emerge --update world Then you'll be on the cutting edge(again)
Odd. I just installed on a box here a few days ago on a system that can't boot from a CD. It's only a 500mhz pentium machine. I just booted using grub and tftp and mounted the cd and went from there. Took me a couple days to build everything but it works great.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
Oh, yeah, I also couldn't get KDE to compile with `-O3 -mcpu=i686' on a fairly new Dell Xeon machine. I'd get all sorts of random errors like 'Illegal instruction', so I had to build all KDE packages with "-mcpu=i486", then I tried i686 again and the kdebase package compiled successfully this time! The mailing lists just advise to play with the compile options in order to get KDE working. Weird.
Bush Lies Watch
I've been a Gentoo user for 7 months now, and I do like the "cutting edge" aspect of it, but this "up to dateness" comes at a cost. Because the distro is actually one that you build with the tools that Gentoo provides, it's possible that no one is using it with the same versions of x, y and z that you have.
This makes stability a huge issue, and on several occasions I've had to rebuild programs because they got borked by an update of something else. Also, I've had emerge f#*k my system so badly that no one on the forums could help me, and I required a "from scratch" install.
I've been using Linux (Slackware, Debian, SuSE, etc..) for 5 or 6 years in an academic and work environment, and at this point I often feel Gentoo is more trouble than it's worth.
Having said that, Gentoo is the distro I'm running right now...
JUST BE CAREFULL.
-... ---
While Gentoo does rock, I don't suggest any of the cutting edge stuff for production boxes.
... but again, I was able to back out stuff quite easilly, and the benefits of having current stuff that does work makes this added burden very worthwhile IMHO.
... something that in many cases simply isn't acceptable (though in some cases it can be ... I do have an old GNU/Linux 2.0.x box that hasn't been upgraded in years, because it is behind a much more current firewall and does its one simple task just fine). Gentoo (and Source Mage, to be fair) solves this problem by giving you pretty good stability while allowing you to run very up-to-date software.
One should always do significant testing before rolling something out for production use. This is true whether or not the software in question is "cutting edge."
That having been said, there can be real advantages to using up-to-date software in a production environment. You may need the new features (e.g. X support of a new touchscreen the tablets you want to deploy require) or bugfixes (KDE 3.0.1 v. KDE 2.2.1 is a good example here), so cutting edge software, while it should be treated with caution, can be very beneficial.
The key is rigorous testing prior to deployment, so while this means the software your using will likely be at least a month or two old, it can still be pretty cutting edge if that is what is required, and it holds up in testing. In our case, X 4.2 was deployed very quickly (within 6 weeks of its release), as was KDE 3.x, while other "cutting edge" stuff, like gcc 3.x, probably won't be deployed for another 6 months because it didn't hold up in testing.
You are right, though, Gentoo (and Source Mage, for those who like trying out a pallate of different source based distros) can lead one into temptation. I've installed and backed out more than one bleeding edge app on my home machine for just this reason
At the other extreme, Debian's 2-year-old plus 'stable' distro isn't the answer. With the speed with which free software evolves, running 2 year-old free software is analogous to running 10-year old proprietary software
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Pulling it out of my ass, I'm willing to bet most of the perceived speedup probably comes from custom compilation of glibc and XFree86.
Yes, but BSD ports and portage are *far* more elegant than apt or rpm has ever been.
I finally deleted my Windows partition. I figured that, as long as I'm messing with my partitions, I may as well ditch Mandrake 8.2 for a ``real'' distribution in the process.
I set apart all of Saturday to scrounge through my system to find and backup all my data files, and then to download and install Gentoo 1.2. So far, I have been mildly impressed. I have run into the following problems though:
I live on-campus, and my school blocks port 80 and makes everyone go through The Great Proxy Server. This does not jive well with emerge. The installation instructions, which I printed out before starting, say something about setting the HTTP_PROXY variable in the /etc/make.conf file, which I tried setting, to no avail. I then set the environment variables. That didn't work either. I looked for Lynx, or something to browse the Web with, and nothing was available (please no smart comments about telnet, thank you very much).
My school maps my network account to the hardware address of my network card, so I couldn't just plug in my laptop to get net access to get more documentation. I was about to run out to a computer lab, when I realized that the Gentoo 1.2 installation environment included iptables (I have 2 network cards in my system)! After a little bit of NAT magic, I had my laptop on-line, and I checked the FAQ, which mentioned, ``Oh, and if setting the PROXY environment variables in make.conf doesn't work, set it in wget's configuration files.'' So it uses wget. Nice to know. Setting the proxy there worked, and I was on my way!
I set the USE variable in make.conf, and then started emerge'ing. I was a little worried about how the compile settings really would be (i.e., would X, qt, and KDE be compiled with the necessary flags to enable anti-aliased fonts? It turns out that they were.) Compiling KDE took the better half of the afternoon, since it had to compile X and qt first. It worked like a charm!
So far, the only problem has been trying to emerge openoffice. The first time I tried, it complained about gcc 2.95.3 (it wanted 3.0.4). After ebuild'ing gcc 3.0.4, it started up. A couple of hours later, it bombed on something about not finding javac. There's a line in openoffice-1.0.0-r1.ebuild that reads ``COMMONDEPEND='... >=virtual/jdk-1.3.1''', but it prompted me for my java directory, and I wasn't sure what to type in there. And javac isn't on my system now, although that dependency should have prompted emerge to install it.
Well, these kinds of problems can be easily resolved by hand, but it goes to show that it can be difficult to get everything right the first time around in something like Gentoo. mozilla compiled without a hitch, and as soon as I fired it up this morning, I found this story, and thought I'd post my experience for all to enjoy. Oh... and my mozilla compiled with anti-aliased fonts, by default!
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
I can't give you hard benchmark figures, but I can give you personal experience. Redhat 7.2 in X on the machine was very slow. Switching VC's lagged, compiling the kernel in a Konsole would make the cursor lag around the screen and trying to load too many things really bogged the system down.
But, with a Stage1 Gentoo 1.1a install (Stage 1 compiles everything, Stage 2 and three use increasingly larger lists of precompiled binaries.) with CCFLAGS and CCXFLAGS set to '-O3 -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4' in make.conf, the system is decidedly faster in KDE3. I run XChat without gnome, Konsole, Konqueror, and the KDE desktop all compiled locally with the above optimizations. It's incredibly responsive and very very usable.
Emerging the gentoo-sources package will bring down a laundry list of kernel patches such as the pre-empt and latency packages and all sorts of fun stuff. The only snag there is that my laptop was done with XFS as it's sole filesystem, and pre-empt and XFS don't play well, at all.
Is it perfect? No. OpenOffice takes forever to load. Mozilla takes less time but it's still a while, but it runs very well once it's going. (This is binary OO and Moz, not compiled locally.)
The system just plain doesnt have the balls to run something like CrossoverPlugin with QT5, and compiling a kernel still bogs the system down a bit, but not as much as with redhat. It's still a very usable machine.
And, the biggie, "emerge KDE" took 12 hours. X took a bit less than that. A recent "emerge --update world" which updates every package on the system that's been updated on the main rsync/cvs tree took 24 hours. I have other machines that I use in the interim, so it's not a huge problem for me.
Let me agree with one thing alot of Gentoo fans here have said. This is not a dist for everyone. It's not something I'd use for my parents, for example. But it's not a hardcore experts only dist either.
Many here have made a big deal about "I don't want to have to compile everything." The thing is, you don't compile a thing. You never type make. Want XChat? type "emerge xchat" and portage will go out to the fast repository at ibiblio and download the tar.bz2, compile and install. You do nothing but the one command.
Want ImageMagick? type "emerge ImageMagick" and it'll do the same. Whoops, it wants libjpeg and libpng which you don't have installed? It'll go grab those too and install them first. You've typed exactly one command.
Sure, it takes longer to compile something than it does to install it from a binary rpm. That's a fact of life. But is it worth taking that time for binaries that run 5-10% faster because of the local optimizations? It is for me. I'm currently laying plans for a new desktop that's a dual AthlonMP 2100, with a make.conf flag to make with -j3 it'll compile pretty damn fast. And when the next Gentoo is released with gcc3, there will be athlon optimizations which will make the apps just that much faster.
I've turned several friends of mine on to Gentoo. Hardcore dist bigots who have all been incredibly impressed. I can't say enough nice things about it.
Every revision of redhat frustrated me more and more from the severe bloat. I had all but given up on Linux for OpenBSD. Gentoo has been impressive enough to pull me back from that brink. I've got a dual processor machine on the way (And OpenBSD has no SMP) and Gentoo got the nod. (Which, of course, the trolls will love, since, you know, BSD is dead)
I decided to do an install of Gentoo 1.1 on my Ultra 30 in order to replace my Debian install (which I was testing and hadn't actually got around to using just yet).
Compiling stage 2 took hours. Granted, the UltraSparc was only at 300 Mhz. But you better have a lot of time to do your compiles. Anyways, I built GCC 2.95 but I'm guessing it was built as a 32-bit binary. I didn't want to spend the time compiling everything else as 32-bit considering how long stage 2 took, especially when I got some sort of OpenSSL error.
So I decided to re-install, this time choosing to compile GCC 3.1 first. Again, this took hours but did succeed. So I fired off the bootstrap script and GCC 3.1 tried to compile again. Unfortunately, this failed, and I was again left with a non-working Gentoo install.
I thought I'd give Gentoo another try and decided to cheat using the Stage 3 tarball. I was able to compile the kernel with egcs64 and was able to boot. However, I ended up having some sort of problem with my keyboard map. At that point, I'd had enough and decided to wipe it clean and reinstall Debian unstable.
Just a few days ago I wiped the system clean once again and did a bit of the install of SuSE 7.3 and I was definitely impressed by the installer. It was the first time I'd used SuSE, so it made a good impression.
Next I think I'll try Splack.
Gentoo definitely looks like a cool distro, but it needs a bit more polish on Sparc before it will see widespread use. I'm definitely looking forward to it's next revision. However, I was really hoping to do some testing of the latest open source goodness on UltraSparc... kernel 2.5, XFree 4.2 and Gnome 2/KDE 3.
I guess I'll have to wait a few months...
> Why should GNU get so much credit for writing a compiler and few other tools.
Because if you were to remove the compiler and "few other tools" like glib you'd be left with a pile of neat source code.
That's like saying that because my car requires gas to function, that it should be called a Nissan Texaco/Altima, or a Nissan Chevron/Altima. If I were to remove that precious gas, I'd be left with a pile of metal. I do lack the time to make my car go without gas, so I guess I won't be ditching it anytime soon. But I won't be prepending Texaco/ or Chevron/ or anything else in order to show my appreciation.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
gentoo is free. and since when is profitting off of open source software against the rules? linus doesn't live in a college dorm room anymore, he profits off of it every day. (albeit indirectly) so redhat is against the rules? or mandrake? they sell it.
I like the idea of comiling everything for my machine, but why can't they just compile it for my proc? I mean is there really a larger difference between my 1400+XP Athlon and your 1200+ XP Athlon? Will GCC generate code that is better for my machine if I run it on mine as opposed to someone else doing it for me? I don't really think so. If another distro started to release builds for Athlons, P4s, P3s, etc. I think that would be a much better use of time and enegry (and I would actually run it). As opposed to having to install the SRPM (or tar.gz) and compile for your arch and system. :)
Though that is what makes linux fun sometimes.
I've been using Gentoo for 3 months now (and Slackware for 3 years before that). I am VERY satisfied with Gentoo. It is very predictable, very easy to configure, and incredibly fast (curtousy of the ease of recompiling pretty much everything). Of course I will be 'emerge rsync'ing now, but I'm REALLY waiting for Gentoo 2.0 where they will move to gcc-3.1 (or maybe 3.2) as the default compiler. I have tested Gentoo 1.1a with gcc-3.1 and 99% of stuff compiled, but it was the 1% that didn't that ended up screwing things up. But anyway Gentoo is a great distro which stays very up-to-date and is maturing quite nicely.
Long live the compiler!
On an Athlon 1800 it took over 24 hours to compile a working system w/kde+gnome. It's a nice distro but I don't have that amount of time to waste - add another 8 hours to hand configure the system. Several of the compiled packages didn't work (Pan wouldn't start, kde kept falling over) and mozilla wouldn't even compile.
The dependencies are also a bit screwy - vim is dependent on XFree86?
I'll probably go back to it in 6 months or so when it's matured as a distro, but it's a bit beta at the moment. If the debian internal politics get much worse it might even be sooner...
It's normally installed by default by most distros.
They're rather poor open gl libraries, I'm not sure if they're software only or what, but they seem slow as hell for me. (but I am using an nvidia card, so perhaps it's just nvidia that's not properly supported, on the grounds they have their own drivers)
No freaking idea, I'm still using Mandrake, and because of my stupid Australian ISP my usage limits on the net won't allow me to ever go up to Gentoo, despite my great desire to do so.
Have you considered looking around on the Gentoo site for help? In all likelyhood it's something they have added to portage.
Or maybe you're trying to build a special-purpose machine, like something small and portable, or trying to reuse an old machine as a firewall or print server, or it's a laptop that didn't have a CDROM when you acquired it and isn't made any more.
I've got a labful of antiques at work, because procuring modern machines requires a Budget, while procuring leftover fully-depreciated boxes that the Centralized MIS Bureaucracy doesn't want any more gives me machines that are usually just fine for pinging and tracerouting to -- in a router training application, you need lots of endpoints that don't need to be very bright. Antique laptops are especially nice for this, because they don't take much space in a rack.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks