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Gentoo Ricer Comparison
Dozix007 writes "The folks over at Funroll-Loops have created a funny comparison between the Ricer fad gripping the US, and Gentoo Linux. In a quote from the site 'Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball bats...'"
...from this recent comment.
...I am a Gentoo user and fan.
/etc/inittab file.
Gentoo is not necessarily good because of the product, but in large part because of the process. When you finish doing a stage whatever (especially 1) install, you end up learning an awful lot about Linux that someone that drops in a SuSe/RedHat/Fedora Core/whatever disk doesn't know. Most experienced Linux users will see that a user that understands whats going on under the hood will fare better than one who gives you a thousand yard stare when you mention the
I think the benefits of compiling from source on everything are varied at best, and only sometimes outweighed by the time necessary to do it. That said, in some cases it is a good thing - if used correctly, the USE flags are nifty and let you compile without support for features you don't need. This can be quite useful, and provide a modest speed up in some cases.
Ricers aside, Gentoo provides a superb package management system in the spirit of apt/yum, and is also source based. It boosts users with moderate knowledge level to a better understanding of the architecture of a Linux system, and this can lead to some absurd enthusiasm about the distro for the younger/more impressioanable types, but I take it much the same way I take any fanboy mentality: you'll see the upsides and the downsides as time goes on. I happen to think Gentoo is great on the whole, so I use it.
Its just as childish for the folks annoyed by the Gentoo zealots to turn around be be anti-Gentoo zealots, creating webpages and ranting on about how horrible a community it is. Stop by the forums and you'll see its a responsive, well informed group, the majority of whom are quite reasonable.
You missed the definition by a mile.
If you buy a Honda, and spend a few thousand dollars building up the powertrain, you're not a ricer. If you take that same Honda, and spend all your money on rims, stickers, and a big-ass aluminum wing for downforce in the back when the drive tires are in the front, you're a ricer.
If you buy a Pontiac, and spend a few thousand dollars building up the powertrain, you're not a ricer. If you take that same Pontiac, and spend all your money on rims, stickers, and a big-ass wing, then you're a ricer.
See?
I believe "ricer" refers to the tendancy for it to be done to Japanese cars. Not by Japanese people.
it's got nothing to do with eating rice... it's a contraction of the original term "Rice Burner" as applied to Japanese motorcycles as a derogatory term from purists who'd rather ride some BMW or triumph or worse, from fat arsed yanks on overweight Harleys, who'd never be able to get their legs over a Japanese bike in the first place
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Oh my god, I've been wasting my time all these years! What was I thinking? All those websites running off binary mod_php packages were useless!
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
White americans have been modding American cars since the days of Henry Ford but we don't call them "potatoers" or whatever the staple white american food is.
According to american culture, at least, those whiteys would be referred to as "greasemonkeys", "gearheads", "rodders", etc. And, again according to American culture, it's becoming known as "pimping out" the car. Which is of course, very politically correct itself. Selling women as a commondity == improving a car.
Hey, did you know that in the vast majority of northern China, people don't eat rice?
Hey, did you know that the vast majority of Asian cars aren't from China? What the hell does that really have to do with anything? Do you even know where the motorsport slang term "rice" comes from?
Of course, they're all gooks and chinks to us, eh?
From the way you're flaming on, I am guessing you don't.
It came from some performance bike racers in Japan mixing their standard fuel with alcohol to help boost power in the small engines at high RPM. Some of them used alcohol distilled from rice wine, and thus caught the nickname of "rice burners". Because that's literally what they were doing. This was way more common 15 -20 years ago, these days it's fallen out of vogue as modern racing fuel mixtures either have methanol in them already, or are formulated to not need it.
Man I love ignorance.
To each their own. You certainly do seem to indulge in it, so...
Gentoo Sparc is the only sparc distro that is up2date on the sparc cpu/platform. SuSE/Redhat dropped support. :(
So if you want Linux on your Sparc machine, Gentoo has the most up2date desktop and packages.
NVI is a good minimialistic vi. Vim supports many more features and in most applications the resource usage is small enough. If your looking to run a hundred VT420 terminals off an i486 then perhaps nvi or elvis would be better choices. However, vim has many advantages over "traditional" versions of vi and are well worth the install, unless your a dirty dirty emacs hippy.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
If so... time it.
I've gone to great lengths and benchmarks to establish whether or not gcc per-processor optimizations are actually as good as ricers (you) say they are, and concluded that the difference is so small only a select few synthetic benches will really benefit. The biggest and only consistent improvement to performance is use of -O1 instead of -O0. Everything else is such a small difference that it's hardly worth reading the manpage for, let alone typing in every time you set up a box.
Here, example of a code and Makefile I wrote to test gcc's optimization, results:
dave@thor inst $ make
-O: 612 cycles
-O2: 615 cycles
-O3: 609 cycles
-O3 -march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math: 626 cycles
(Cycles is how many times it repeated a certain function in a fine-grained time frame) There you are. -O3 is slower than -O2, -O2 is only very very slightly faster than -O (and if you re-run, half the time it will be slower), and a "k-l33t cFlaGz omghax" is only a notch faster than those. This is one of the sources I developed which benefits the [b]most[/b] from this tweaking! In a real-world application it makes so little difference it's not worth recompiling anyway. "hella faster" my ass. You're better off overclocking or something.
Gentoo Is Rice. You are a ricer. You got owned by someone who bothers measuring things. HAND.
(Besides, USE is the real advantage of Gentoo, the sooner you take that more seriously the better your life will be)
Sam ty sig.
Why not? Can you not count? :P
Been running gentoo for ~a year, server and desktop, and I've had nowhere near as many packaging problems as I had with mandrake and suse... The only time I had problems was when I updated the base system and used the new fstab instead of keeping the current one :/
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
You might want to try the Forums then, same helpful people and attitude, but things don't just scroll by. :)
Spine World
Binary packages ARE compiled. Read what you wrote. It doesn't make a lick of sense. I'm sure what you meant to write was hand-compiled packages are more efficient, blah blah blah. Which is equally nonsense. There are many many variables which many Gentoo people are ignorant of.
Yes, read the explanation, 'cycles' as in how many times the function was repeated. Not as in CPU cycles.
And I have tried this on many codes, big and small, real-world and synthetic, mine and popular. I don't know what 'big boost' you're talking about - you realise -O3 only adds two relatively minor flags over -O2, right? Read the manpage, and failing that, the source. I have.
And where are your figures?
Sam ty sig.
I run Gentoo, but don't really give a rat's ass about most compiler flags... It's just the first distribution I installed where I was able to setup the system EXACTLY how I wanted it and be able to easily maintain it. I know there are others out there that do it fine, but this is the first one I found and so I never uninstalled it.
Now, the reason I replied, you should update to the newest version of Portage. It is MUCH faster, an emerge -Dup world took me 10-12 minutes to calculate last week and now it is about 2 minutes after upgrading.
It's an optimization flag for GCC that "unrolls" loops -- expands one or more iterations in place, to prevent the need to use jump instructions.
The speed advantage of loop unrolling is questionable nowadays, because it results in significantly larger binaries; in the old days, however, people used to unroll their loops by hand.
With today's incredibly fast clock speeds, loop unrolling is very often a bad thing, because the speed advantage is minimal compared to the large increase in binary size.
It's one of several foolish compilation flags passed around by word of mouth; as the website claims, it is often part of the CFLAGS of the most fanatic (and naive) Gentoo users, along with silly things like "-O10" and atrocities like "-ffast-math".
CFLAGS="-O -pipe -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer"
Some Gentoo users may be ricers, but naivete has never been a reason to insult an entire group.
In a real-world application it makes so little difference it's not worth recompiling anyway.
I am not a developer with my own optimization test code. I am a user with an extraordinary real-life requirement to perform a certain application as fast as I possibly can. It has been my job to come up with performance alternatives over the past few months, and I have professionally evaluated Windows, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Gentoo in a lab environment with code that actually does something. I have measured output performance to the millisecond and have more raw analysis data than I can back up to a DVD at the moment.
Gentoo (with -O3 and march=pentium4) significantly outperforms everything else. During run-to-failure testing, Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.
The difference between -O1 and -O3 may certainly be rice (but I was able to determine that by reading the gcc docs), but Gentoo itself most certainly is not.
The practice of bolting useless crap to your car, sticking stickers (for products that are not installed on your car), having 6 foot tall wings, a tailpipe the size of a coffee can, and generally making a relatively nice subcompact car total junk is called "ricers" because the people who do that to cars tend to use Honda Civics, etc. Since they tend to use cheap subcompact Japanese vehicles, the derogatory term "Ricer" evolved.
:)
Type-R stickers refer to the Civic type-R line (not sold in the USA --The only type-R line sold in the US is the Acura Integra.) The type-R Civics are highly-tuned performance cars. Therefore, ricers who are trying to impress their friends will buy a type R sticker and slap it on their stock civic and try to convince people they have a true type R.
The running joke is that a type R sticker instantly adds 10 horsepower to a ricer
For a good example of ricers, see the movie The Fast and the Furious. Prepare to laugh. Also visit http://www.riceboypage.com for definitions and pictures (their hall of shame is pretty good)
The difference between esearch and 'emerge -s' is like the difference between 'find / -name "foo"' and 'locate foo', for the same reason. It will index your ebuilds, and if you set a cron job to emerge sync and run 'eupdatedb' (to update the index) regularly, you'll always have up-to-date, lightning-fast searches.
Haha, that tired old argument: "They're just JEALOUS!!!"
Guess what knob, that argument is wrong. It's not envy, it's not jealously, it's disgust for the morons that arrogantly tell others that their system is better for reasons that are clearly incorrect.