Gentoo Linux 

Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.setup
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 20:49:03 GMT
> Hello, I was wondering what all of you thought about Gentoo Linux (its pro's
> and con's) as well as if it is advisable for me to install it on a box with
> a 56k proxy connection to the internet.  I heard it is supposed to be a lot
> faster than other distributions.

Having just installed Gentoo yesterday and wiped it again today, I at least have a fresh opinion on it. ;)

My advice re: Gentoo is — wait. It's decent but still not so good as some of the other OS. Portage isn't as big as some other package collections yet, nor has QA had much chance to get rolling yet.

I find Debian to be faster than even optimized Gentoo (or even FreeBSD!). This doesn't make any sense to me but I know speed when I see it.

In your particular case I'd steer you away from it anyway. Your network will give you pain with this system, and if you've never run a source-based distro you've no idea how long it can take to build stuff on an older machine. (It takes 12 hours to build KDE 3.1 on this Athlon 1.3 GHz 384MB RAM!)

Ray Kohler

Gentoo Linux 

I've installed Gentoo on an older machine recently (PII450). The installation and portage works fine. But the procedure is long and tedious. You absolutely need a good Internet connection. My machine certainly spend 50 hours downloading / compiling !

In comparison with other distributions I don't think there is a important performance gain. But you know what's going on and certainly learn much about the Linux innards. If you want to avoid this then you are much better off with a 'traditional' distro.

Markus

Gentoo Linux 

The sourced based distros (LFS, Gentoo, Sourcemage etc.) do have a big performance increase over binary distro, put you pay for this in easy of administration.

If you've got a bit of linux experience and are not afraid of a bit of time consuming work, I'd say go for it, maybe give my distro Sourcemage Linux a shot. IMHO it has a better packaging system then gentoo

Joel Mayes

Gentoo Linux 

> useless.  I guess the only remaining question I have is whether Gentoo
> offers any performance benefits over FreeBSD 4.7, assuming I installed from
> a stage3 tarball.

It seems to break even so far as I can tell. Coming from FreeBSD you'll likely notice a couple of things:

unmerging (removing) packages doesn't take into account dependencies, so you can really blow things up when cleaning unwanted packages. You can even unmerge glibc if you try.

Gentoo uses the authors' build processes more strictly than FreeBSD. The FreeBSD guys sometimes take time-saving shortcuts since it's not necessary to have support for non-FreeBSD, the Gentoo devel team doesn't do this.

Ray Kohler

Gentoo Linux 

> Thanks alot for your advice.  I am going to stick with FreeBSD as I have a 4
> cd set with almost all the packages precompiled (a nice thing on my slow
> machine) although sometime when I have a lot of time to kill I think I will
> try Gentoo :)

If you have a lot of time to kill LFS will teach you more about Linux than Gentoo.

David