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Gentoo is Fast on New G5s
Durin_Deathless writes "According to a thread on the Gentoo/PPC forums, some Gentoo users have installed Gentoo on their new G5s without any problems whatsoever. Benchmarks are extraordinary: compiling kde on a G5 running at half speed takes 15 minutes, while it takes one hour on the fastest P4 available. Gentoo/PowerPC lead, Pieter Van den Abeele, reported that the machine currently runs at half speed due to fan controlling hardware not yet supported. The Gentoo team will post benchmarks, and will update installation instructions as soon as possible. There is some question as to what exactly was compiled, as the times seem impossibly fast even on the P4."
There was a followup post where the originator of the thread stated that he actually only compiled KDEBASE and KDELIBS...not the entire KDE setup. So no, unfortunately the G5s don't bring us 10x the performance just yet :)
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
Do the editors of slashdot even read what they link to? The forum thread was the most useless thread I've ever read. Nothing is proven. Nothing is confirmed. And some guy is claiming he installed suse 64bit for AMD on a G5... tell me there is something more interesting out there!!!
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
There is some question as to what exactly was compiled, as the times seem impossibly fast even on the P4.
No kidding... my Athlon XP 2500 took about 15 hours to compile KDE. You can't even download all the KDE packages in 15 minutes.
Besides, the actual "kde" ebuild is nothing more than a little flag that says yes indeed, I installed all the other KDE packages: kdebase, kdenetwork, kdemultimedia, kdeaddons, kdeedu, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdeadmin, kdeutils, kdeartwork and kdepim.
Fortunately, you don't need to install each one if you want to use KDE's basic functions.
G5 is lots faster than P4? This is so obvious to even the most clueless home computer user! I mean, come on, how can a P4 possibly compete with a G5? The G5 is clearly 1 ahead!
Can slashdot please tell us something that's not common knowledge? I mean geez, next the'll be like: Saddam Masterminded 9/11. Well no duh!
Long time ago... I learned that the hard disk speed is the most important factor in compile speeds. Once you have LOTS of memory, then get the fastest SCSI hard drive you can get your hands on... forget 7200 RPM IDE drives, think 15K RPM SCSI disks. Every time you have to open a new file for compiling... you have to spin (on average) 1/2 of the disk to get your head positioned... it makes a huge difference
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Actually, the real test will come when somebody measures how fast this thing can copy a 17 megabyte file from one folder to another.
Let's analyze this article:
some Gentoo users have installed Gentoo on their new G5s without any problems whatsoever.
No. Only one entirely unreliable user made outrageous claims including running Gentoo. Not users but user.
while it takes one hour on the fastest P4 available.
The user said "my Pentium 4" without saying anything about what that Pentium 4 was. For all we know it could be an old 1.6Mhz with 128MB.
Pieter Van den Abeele, reported that the machine currently runs at half speed due to fan controlling hardware not yet supported.
He says that it may be possible to get the kernel working and if it did then it would run at half-speed. There is no "machine currently" running it to confirm this and it also proves that the other guy is lying.
The Gentoo team will post benchmarks, and will update installation instructions as soon as possible.
According to Abeele - "As far as I know, *none* of the Gentoo developers that are working on support for the G5." Now I guess that eventually they will benchmark and update installation instructions but it is obviously not on the radar screen right now.
The author of this article and pudge should be whipped for putting this awful article up.