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Graphical Gentoo Installer In The Works
JonLatane writes "Without a doubt, Gentoo has set itself apart from every other distro out there. Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed. Because of emerge, it's notorious for being simple to maintain. And because of its "install system" (if it can be called that), it's notorious for scaring off potential users before they even get to try it. Well, that's all going to change, because there is a graphical Gentoo installer in the works. It can run with a dialog frontend that bears a striking similarity to Ubuntu, or for faster systems a GTK+ frontend is available."
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Won't Gentoo lose all of it's coolness factor if anybody who can click a mouse can install it?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Some of the things I learned:
1. My time is better spent doing things other than compiling basic system utilities.
2. My optimized Gentoo system does not run faster enough to make up for the time lost building it from source.
3. Turns out there was nothing to learn from installing Gentoo from stage 1. I already knew what goes into a system at the most basic level, but I got this from 10+ years of Unix/Linux experience, before I ever saw Gentoo.
Going to try MEPIS now. 'Sposed to be easy and painless.
Edith Keeler Must Die
No... You don't need those requirements... Distcc helps nicely and can cut the compile time for a base system by one third... Sometimes to get the biggest gain in anything you have to be willing to do a little work (in this case - research).
You don't have to compile anything with gentoo to get up and running if you RTFM and download the packages cd along with your install image. You can have a system up and running in a few hours. Then if you wish you can rebuild all your packages over a weekend while you are out fishing.
Insert clever sig (here)
I think most people are "scared off" because they don't have the 4 GHz computer with a gig of RAM required to compile the entire system under a couple days
This is just as bad as the intro. I run Gentoo, and compiling most apps is very reasonable. There are a few packages that DO take a LONG time (KDE and OpenOffice.org are commonly the worst offenders). However, for somebody who runs a light desktop like I do (Fluxbox) it's perfectly fine. Additionally, many packages are available in precompiled binary packages to speed this process up. I know a few people that compile everything except OO.o, for example.
Just my $0.02.
In some benchmarks (such as the one povray uses), gentoo systems are often near the top. In this respect, it isn't unearned. But this doesn't mean every app on the system has been made measurably quicker & that some ricers aren't using ridiculous CFLAGS which do more harm than good.If anyone can find this article, please post a link.
While I've certainly seen poor benchmarks from some systems, the default CFLAGS are '-O2 -pipe'. This is typical of other distributions & is NOT "overagressive."
Users can certainly choose their own CFLAGS, which can lead to better or worse performance than the default CFLAGS. This kind of makes benchmarking a joke: The particular combination used in a particular article will not be representative of all gentoo installations.
The problem, however, is that you need to look at one of the most basic rules for optimization: Determine what needs to be optimized, *then* optimize. Otherwise, you waste your time.
Compiling for modern processors with good optimization flags, for example, *does* give big performance boosts. However, most applications are not CPU hogs - in fact, few are. Well, what about small binary sizes? Most disk performance issues are from latency, not speed in reading consecutive blocks (and most binaries don't get big enough for the length of the read to become a dominating factor, because they wisely use shared libraries). We can't forget the effects disk caching. And, of course, there's pesky things that optimization just won't help you with, like the fact that compiling out modules generally doesn't make much of an impact on the memory footprint, core execution speed, or hardware delays.
Overall, I'd expect performance increases in Gentoo, but on average very small ones. If you're running some computational flow dynamics program, build it from source; otherwise, I wouldn't be too concerned.
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.
I put Gentoo on a VIA based system with 32M of ram. It was the perfect distro b/c I was able to put the very minimal amount of software on it with Cyrix specific optimizations--something no other distro could offer.
Took a while to build, but what do I care.
I could handle emerge. What I couldn't handle was all the constant re-configuring of all the little /etc files.
/etc files based on silly questions that it asks me, and then puts helpful comments in the file so that should I need to change it later, I can.
That's why I use debian. Debian makes the
Config tools, please.
Other than that, I was able to get the hang of Gentoo.
Installing Gentoo can teach you about partitions, some system services, and bootloaders, among other things. People say "but you're just copying commands verbatim!", but the text actually does give you useful information. For example:Watching GCC output scroll by won't teach you a damn thing, but reading the installation guide will.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz