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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...'"
Jesus Christ, is there a /.er who hasn't been here? I've seen it linked dozens of times, just about any time there's a Gentoo story. Old news.
WTF? This is so old... is an editor cranky and want them slashdotted? :(
...and it's stupid. It's insulting to the hard work by the Gentoo folks, and ignorant to imply that a) Gentoo is the only distribution that has a few vocal-but-clueless users mixed in with the friendly, intelligent, and helpful ones, and that b) just because these vocal-but-cluesless users don't have a good reason for using Gentoo means that there is none.
This is just great evidence for how far downhill Slashdot's gone.
ZOMGbbq my code runs soooooooooo much faster then those stewped other n00bs who use binaries. they r teh missing out on all the gcc screensaver pwnage.
lets offend as many people as possible... lets see.. dress up CmdrTaco in blackface with a bucket of chicken in his hand.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Up tight morons who spend their lives getting so offended by these 'ricers'.
I couldn't give a rat's arse about these people. If they want to spend weeks getting an imagined 1% performance improvement then great, I'm quite happy to ignore them.
Seems like here we have a case where something is so good that people start to downplay it. I find gentoo to be a great distribution, while some people might say they are 1337 by installing it, its a rather simple installation where you just follow the instructions. And I love it because of how minimalistic it is, I install what I want and nothing that I don't want. That's what I love about gentoo!
...from this recent comment.
... or does entire article deserve a -5 for Troll, and Flamebait? This isn't informative, enlightening, or particularily funny whatsoever. Slashdot is supposed to be 'News for nerds. Stuff that matters.' What some kids do in their spare time to flip off an entire community of hackers, users, and people has no place on a site like this. I've learned more about Linux hanging around in #gentoo and being apart of the forums these short six months than I have anywhere else in the last two years.
My morale with this is the same when playing Unreal Tournament - Don't bash the newbies. We were all newbies once.
I put "rice tickets" on stupid ricer cars.
Isn't stupid ricer redundant?
ahh, this is golden:
To me, an extra 0.1% performance increase, even if I am only imagining it to be faster, is certainly worth one day a week recompiling all of the latest packages from source code. Even if I do occasionally get my CFLAGS in a muddle! I think I speak for Slashdot when I say that Gentoo is the only sane option for getting the most from your hardware!
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I saw one of those oversized wings on a 2002 Mustang today. Nice car, kept clean, but with this ragged looking elevated flap marring the back like a vast plastic hangnail. It wasn't even the same color. I swear, I wanted to make a citizen's arrest. Then I noticed it was a V6, so I let the loser off with a warning.
--- Ban humanity.
...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 know, I don't want to be always be the politically correct one, but the term ricer has always seemed inappropriate when coming out of a non-asian person's mouth.
Now, it does so happen that many "ricers" are asian, that the practice probably originated in west-coast asian-american subculture. It is likewise true that East Asians consume large amounts of rice, although this is not necessarily true of Asian Americans (many of whom are sadly about as out of touch with their culture of their ancestors as that white guy who says he's German-Irish-Italian).
But I guess it just seems crass to me to take a practice and associate it with the race that does it. It would be like calling Karaoke "Yellow Yodeling". Sure, it's funny, but I would imagine that for the vast majority of non-ricer Asian-Americans it might get tiring to constantly hear their ethnicity lampooned by non-asians who lack the sensitivity to seperate a culture from a steryotype.
But maybe that's just me. Personally, I wouldn't use this term.
After all, it really just is modding Asian imports. 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.
Oh, I hear someone say, "Potatoes aren't the staple of white america! It's not the same!" Hey, did you know that in the vast majority of northern China, people don't eat rice? They eat mantou, I kind of bread, instead. Why? Because rice doesn't grow in subarctic climates.
Of course, they're all gooks and chinks to us, eh? Man I love ignorance.
But hey, the tinted windows, exhaust pipe, and large Momo sticker across the top of the windshield must add at least 100hp right?
Its not what distro you use. As I said I like debian. But stable is not a good desktop distro so I try out ubuntu and love it. Gentoo is awesome because it used one of the best things about BSD (source based distribution) to make linux better. OSS is more about a marketplace of ideas, where projects tinker. Just because someone likes gentoo dosent make them a performance whore, and just because someone likes distro X it dosent mean anything except that they are a member of the communtiy and are trying to do the best with the options that they are given. Lets not let our community be destroyed by idiots on websites or idiots on message boards.
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
I use Gentoo Linux, and I'm anything from a hardcore user. I don't care about having the fastest most optimized packages. I use it because I find it the easiest distribution to configure, customize, and get working correctly. If I have a problem I can usually find an answer my searching. If not I can just ask a question on the forums. The Gentoo community is the friendliest, most responsive there is. I've never seen a touch of the inferred elitismm, and their accomplisments are amazing.
I studied math in school, and the seemingly unimportant achievements of Gentoo users which they enjoy remind me of the satisfaction I got out of every proof I completed. They may seem unimportant and pointless to those not in the field. But real satisfaction and results follow from these activities.
There are always people who can not understand intellectual achivement. But I had expected better of slashdot. I suppose I was naively mistaken.
You might as well check out the Gentoo OPTIMIZBATION Guide http://timedoctor.org/index.php?id=2183
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
It's easy to point and laugh at the neighborhood kid with a Neon equipped with spoilers and excessive stickers (or in this case, a computer with overclocked CPUs and case windows), but really, what's the point?
... but bitching about someone's hobby, which they do for fun, is about as lame as you can get.
... so what's the fuss about?
Now, I can understand complaining about overly loud stereos booming down the street in the wee hours of the morning
Yeah, it may be "illogical." Yeah, it may be "a waste of time and money." But it's not your time, not your money, and quite obviously not your interest
Gentoo of course has all the header files as everything is compiled from source. this doesn't make it faster, it just makes it a lot easier to install a new app wich hasn't yet made it into an rpm.
Yes mandrake is easy to use, far easier to use in fact then windows thanks to its very nice installer BUT it was so easy to use that I could learn all kinds of advanced stuff on it. Like compiling my own kernel to take advantage of my own hardware. I have a rather crappy Asus Dual P3 wich for some reason never works in dual mode with stock kernels. I always have to mess around with boot parameters until I roll my own.
If you then roll your own php and mysql because you want to see the beta's and be prepared with knowing the new features when they reach production well. It is just a short step to just roll your own.
There are probably other distros out there that I could use but I will probably never go back to RPM, it is nice if you never want to bother with compiling but to me that is not a bother.
But making harmless and not so harmless fun of other distros is all part of the fun of using linux. There is so much choice available and people have this in build need to defend their own choice that conflict is inevitable. Some people take it to far but that is just part of it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I hate to plug my own shit but here's my whole take on the Gentoo-bashing stuff. To make a long story short, Linux distros are like punk bands - the hardcore (lame) punk fans only like a band until it makes it big. Once that happens they turn their backs on it and find a less paletable, more obscure group.
Screw em'. Let them be fucktards if they want to. I use Gentoo because it's easy. I'm lazy and it works every time - in a predictable way. The product is great, the forums are great, and if I run any other distro it's because I am in a time crunch or because it's at work and people will only sign off on Redhat. To me, distros boil down to the package managment and the community support. Gentoo excels in both areas.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
Just asking for a bunch of flame posts it seems. Gentoo has a great package system and a great community (especially the Gentoo Forums which has helped a lot through many problems for many distributions, hell do a search, it's better than google, heh). Granted there are those few fanatics (so do all distributions and OS's), this really doesn't help anyone but try to discredit Gentoo users as a bunch of idiot teenage kids. I think the many posts here already sums everything up.
Probably one of the saddest developments in America in the last few decades is the way "abuse humor" has replaced the real thing -- more and more seems to be about making fun of other people, putting them down, and claiming this is funny. I realize that insulting people is easier than displaying real talent, but still. It is sad to me as an American that the best English-language comedians by far and wide today seem to be Brits, while we're paying "shock jocks" milions to spew garbage that wouldn't be allowed on any well-run playground.
What is even more depressing is the complete lack of self-irony in these pieces. Take Monty Python's song "Never Be Rude To An Arab", where the singer makes fun of himself more than anybody else -- these are the masters, go snivel at their feet. "Fawlty Towers" has an episode where all they do is make fun of Germans ("Never mention the war!") but it is done so well that even my German friends can laugh, because John Cleese makes such a complete ass out of himself, too. Eddie Murphy has lots of abusive humor in his stand-up pieces, but he is the first to make poke fun of himself. At least the guy from Jackass is sticking his own tongue in drainage pipes.
And sorry, I think "ricer" is a racest term. Obviously the Slashdot editors and a lot of people here don't agree, but I was pretty suprised to see this article promoted here. Hope they don't get into trouble with OSTG.
So: It is not funny, it offers no insight, and uses racist language for what seems to be its own sake. Even if it has the word "Gentoo" in it and it is a slow day, I fail to see what this is doing on the front page of Slashdot. Me, I'll stick with reruns of the Soviet Russia jokes, and -- and mod the original article down as "troll".
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.
I've been using Gentoo Linux for 8 months now.
I would just like to say that it made me switch from Windows XP Pro to Linux.
I've used other linux distros over the past few years, but never really took linux to heart. I was able to compile programs and somewhat work with it and got around ok.
The linux distros that I did were binary based systems, just a simple point and click option. This didn't teach me anything, when I did try to build my own app and "make install" it, most of the time it didn't work or broke another application. There is another point.
When you build a app you have compile options "./configure". Lets take xchat for example. When you "install" xchat from a binary distro.. you get xchat, But with what options turned on or off? You have no idea what your getting besides the fact that its xchat.
Now with source based distros you have the option of turning on or off build options. Here is Gentoo's build options for xchat "debug ipv6 mmx nls perl python ssl tcltk xchatdccserver xchatnogtk xchattext" That is a lot of control over what you build.
Another big this is CFLAGS. These are very helpful for older systems, or you just want your programs to use every single feature of your 100-800$ cpu. With Binary distros most compile for i686. OK.. does that mean that gcc will use "mmx mmx2, sse sse2, 3dmow" ??? You have no idea what kind of optimizations you're getting.
I know some Gentoo uses go all out on there CFLAGS, but from what I've notice it makes building the app a lot longer, it just makes gcc try more things to build the apps.
I my self use "-O2 -mcpu=pentium4 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -ffast-math" I wouldn't call that "ricing" its just using all of what my system can do to make the apps run better.
And with Gentoo's emerge system, kind of hard to beat that. Yes apt-get is great, but there is alot of cool tricks that you can do with Gentoo's emerge system. http://gentoo-wiki.com/Emerge
Need help installing gentoo just ask around. Or you can find me in the irc irc2.othersideirc.net #rantradio
Ricenix: Too fast, too optimised!
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
1. Spot a funny website in the previous Slashdot frontpage funny story. Thanks to the Slashdot moderation system, it is easy finding one, since they are usually moderated +5, Funny.
2. Send your "scoop" to Slashdot.
3. Karma profit!
Gentoo is NOT compile-from-source for performance, it's for customization. /usr/bin
:)
I use it a lot and it has grown on me, although what does bother me is the mass amount of files in
Oh well.
he demonstrated by A plus B minus C divided by Z that the sheep must be red, and die of the rot
Well yeah -- if you remember how often one Slashdotter's flamebait is often another's plain truth. In this case, the point of comparison is the Ricer -- an exercise in pure technological ego. A lot of people (including me) find that sort of thing supremely irritating. But the suggestion that many Linux diehards have the same mentality is not far off the mark. Linux nerds (and other kinds of techno-nerds as well) often seem to like the technology for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that, but that means accepting that the picture the nerd projects to the outside world is just a little weird. Worth remembering, no matter what drum you march to.
I find about two thirds of supposedly hillarious USE flags commentary serious, correct and insightful.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
There is one value of Gentoo that I think many people tend to overlook. While many seem to focus on Gentoo's ability to let the user specify optimization flags and build a system from scratch for performance reasons, I adore Gentoo's ability to use packages that are plainly newer than what most other distributions could hope to offer, especially with what one can get from using breakmygentoo's packages.
Unlike loading my system with an absurd quantity optimization flags, I run my system with just a stable "-O -g." This has allowed me to commit a large number of very complete bug reports--and I mean over one hundred--for many projects--e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and KDE--in the past year-and-a-half.
What's more is this: I cannot begin to describe how annoying it is on standard, binary-package distributions to go about using and developing for newer software suites and manually having to deal with bleeding-edge dependencies that these distros would never include end up including for a few months, due to their instability.
I am fine with their potential instability on Gentoo; at least I do not have to go about uninstalling nearly all of distro's Gnome's dependencies and rebuilding them from scratch and dealing with very strange conflicts between the distro's older components and the manually installed newer packages.
If I am not believed, wait two months from now, take a fresh Debian or Fedora install, and attempt to compile the development version of Gnome against it without seriously damaging or fudging the distro's packaging mechanism and dependency system. I can attest that this is one virtue that Gentoo has over nearly every distribution that I have used, in that it minimizes the aforementioned dependency and package hell; and believe me: I have used a wide variety of distros in the past seven years, and only Gentoo has pleased me so well. Granted Gentoo does have its problems, but I have not stuck with a single distribution like it for such a long time, since I had been using Slackware and god-forbid, FreeBSD.
On another note, if some want to claim that the packages contained in Gentoo's portage tree are not bleeding edge, I can say that I personally maintain a rather large, manually created portage overlay that contains numerous unofficial packages. The fact that these packages can be compiled uniformally, installed consistently, and removed with ease is wonderful and something that I would dare not do with another distribution.
Even the Politburo concurs with Process of Elimination http://process-of-elimination.net
Those who mock Gentoo users like this are fools.
It's a sad fact snobbery afflicts Linux geeks as badly as it does other people groups.
Regarding that foolish article, other Linux newbies (that use distros) could easily have similar questions and flawed assumptions.
The process of compiling software into a distribution used to be the last "closed" aspect of the Linux movement. Things like Gentoo helped solved that problem.
Yesterday I was browsing for the source of some software I was trying to install (this was the "Ogg Vorbis Direct Show Filters" that allow Ogg files to play in Windows Media Player), and I found that the released binary was two point versions ahead of the CVS version. i.e. No source existed for something many people thought was open source. (As it turns out, the copyright owner may not have released the source for that version). If this had happened for Linux software, instead of Windows software, Gentoo users would be the among first to notice and discuss that.
Go Gentoo!
[I've never used Gentoo.]
Yup. Things I would never have discovered were I using some other distribution that didn't expose me to these things.
Where's my NetBSD disc?
Originally coming from slackware (3.4 or smth back in '96 I think) I tried lots of things, always ending up again at slackware. Tried SuSE, Redhat, Debian and Mandrake. Some of them were very brief, didn't like Redhat at all, Mandrake was just to play with, but was way to limited. Ended up in gentoo, and after 2 years still there.
.26 was just out I think. The debian installer happily installed a 2.4.18 kernel, and if you check the changelogs between those 2 versions, you'll notice they fixed some pritty bad root-exploits between those versions. Then checked the SSH version - same prob... What the hell should I install as a firewall then? Ok - added the security-update source for debian, which fixed the ssh-problems, but what the hell are you doing if you promote as your default stable version a very-exploitable default-install? I'm not even starting about the config-file managment and their updates... Lost settings more than once there.. :(
Ran debian for +- a year, but really didn't have a good feeling with the system, it just sucks monkeyballs as a desktop machine... Sure - I used the latest unstable or even test, but the problem is - the "unstable" or "test" perfectly discribe their state, I personally had a lot of dependency problems, and when a new version of some software package was released, it took months before it was added. The stable is hopelesly old, ok - stable, but secure?? I recently installed it as a firewall (still running), so I thought stable would be best. At that time, in the 2.4 series, 2.4.24 of
Anyway - I don't like debian - but I can say WHY. This guy just ends up bashing on the users w/o any reason or arguments for "gentoo is bad". He does make gentoo-users look bad because they choose gentoo. Is gentoo bad then? Or is it simply bashing on a small minority inside the gentoo community (which certainly is there, I won't deny that), but which is in no way the whole gentoo community? The others choose their distrib simply cause they liked it and judged on that based on experiences - not on hear-say, but they all get the label of "ricer" like a big yellow star sewed on their clothes, simply because they choose smth a majority feels threatened by or doesn't like (whatever you choose, not gonna go into that-one here). Way to go to critisize a distro. If you do it, do it in a good way. My personal "hesitation" towards debian certainly had to do with how little doc or help I found while installing for the first time. The "doc" (or what it should represent) on the official site was pure garbage at that time. I came from slack, where you just put in a cd or floppy, it boots, and it installs, simple. First problem, where the hell are the installation cd's? I found "unofficial" cdimages, and finally gave one a try, afraid that I had someone's personal vision of a debian system on a cd, so not very sure about what was going to happen when I didn't use some official cdimages. Lateron found out that there weren't any official images - damn... Anyway - ended up installing, followed some instructions, and then the option came up to choose a package installer. It presented 4 choices or smth, dselect as the interactive, easy to use sollution and well - won't say much more than "it's a monster - RUUUUNNN!!!". Ended up reinstalling the whole system 4 times, after which I decided I would simply use apt-get to install separate packages.
This still wasn't really the biggest issue with Debian.. The biggest issue was - the users. Ohhh ooeee auch... What was this article about? Right, gentoo users. What users always have the same critics on gentoo? I have to say, I only heard "complaints" about gentoo by other linux-ers that were running eeh almost afraid to say - debian. But at that time that wasn't the problem yet, since Gentoo didn't exist yet. Well - as a starting debian-user, I ended up reading the oh-so confusing doc on the website (was written in the way a chicken would describe how to create and lay an egg - they just already know how to do it, but not to exp
If you're running gentoo and you're not recompiling your kernel at boot you're just a poser!
You forgot:
-type=R
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
http://wrongknowledge.com/computers/ricer/
It's da shizzle
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)
NVI is a good minimialistic vi [...] unless your a dirty dirty emacs hippy
Sweet! Now we've brought editor religion into the distro war article. Next I'd like to see a little grammar cop action, followed by some media-is-too-liberal vs media-is-too-conservative bickering. For the main event, frothing fundamentalist Randites can instruct us all in how to pronounce Ayn, while carefully being snotty enough that they can't be accused of being unselfish. Then, when everybody tries to shout them down, somebody can end the thread by making Nazi comparisons.
Get to it, boys! Time's a-wastin'!
What is so offensive about ricers.
I for one find them hilarious.
Who can take a civic
A rusty old DX?
Add a giant spoiler and some plastic ground effects?
The ricer man can
the ricer man caaaaan!
My apologies to Sammy Davis Jr.
...is the one behind the wheel. This is just as true with computers as it is with cars.