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Measuring The Benefits Of The Gentoo Approach

Posted by timothy on from the not-necessarily-what-you'd-think dept.

An anonymous reader writes "We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware, but no-one seems to have really tested it. What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging? The article is here."

1 of 467 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Misses the point by countvlad · · Score: 5, Informative

    Portage can be used to install binary (precompiled tbz2 packages of ebuilds).

    From emerge --help:

    --usepkg (-k short option)
    Tell emerge to use binary packages (from $PKGDIR) if they are available, thus possibly avoiding some time-consuming compiles.This option is useful for CD installs; you can export PKGDIR=/mnt/cdrom/packages and then use this option to have emerge "pull" binary packages from the CD in order to satisfy dependencies.

    --usepkgonly (-K short option)
    Like --usepkg above, except this only allows the use of binary packages, and it will abort the emerge if the package is not available at the time of dependency calculation.

    You can also, of course, emerge rpm and install any RPM packages. I'm not sure about debian .deb packages or slackware .tgz packages.

    Gentoo is also accept pre-orders for it's upcoming 1.4 release. Information can be found here, at the Gentoo Store.
    They even have precompiled packages optimizaed for Athlon-XP's - drool!