On Tuesday 03 February 2004 01:15 am, Andrew M. Hoerter wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Derek Glidden wrote:
> > On the flip side, gentoo is getting more popular
>
> Gentoo seems to work well enough, although I'm not sure the "compile
> everything from source" approach is all that great an idea. The
> optimizations gained by using PPro/PII/PIII-specific code generation flags
> are negligible at best, and there are still perfectly good machines out
That may have been true with <gcc-3.2 but >=gcc-3.2 has much better
optimizations now and you are not just limited to Pentium optimizations.
DISCLAIMER: The following is provided for informational purposes only and not
intended to start a flame war on weather the use of compiler optimizations
are worth it or not.
These are the choices - athlon-xp, athlon-mp, athlon-4, athlon-tbird, athlon,
k6, k6-2, k6-3, i386, i486, i586 (Pentium), i686, (PentiumPro), pentium,
pentium-mmx, pentiumpro, pentium2 (Celeron), pentium3 and pentium4.
> there with slow enough processors that compiling the whole system might
> take days. Seems like a solution looking for a problem, when binary
> packages are perfectly useable.
Portage (the Gentoo package manager) allows for the installation of binary
packages. The Gentoo install CD's also have precompiled packages and there
will be mirrors of Gentoo binary packages available for people who either
don't want to compile or have a slower machine but you have to accept the
default USE flags. The USE flags control how various packages are built.
See http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/use-howto.xml for more info on USE flags.
> I'm no Gentoo expert, perhaps there are workarounds and alternative
> methods of installation, etc.
IMHO Portage and the USE flags mentioned above are what really make Gentoo
attractive and thus its growing popularity. The community surrounding Gentoo
is also a big factor.
Gentoo is definitely not for everyone thats for sure. The installation is
either to hard and complex or very flexable depending on your skill level and
your what you intend to use it for.
I have been a Gentoo user and fan for several years now and although its far
from perfect it is *my* solution for many things.
-- Rob
P.S. - Nice to see that Derek is back to "ranting" again. For a while there I
thought we lost ya! :)
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