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Few Questions

  • 22-04-2004 1:48pm
    #1
    McClane
    Closed Accounts Posts: 231 ✭✭


    Hey lads, i'm using Fedora Core 1 on a laptop. p4 3.06, 512 RAM, 128 geforce fx5600.

    I have been noticing slow downs in Gnome upon bootup and i'm just not happy with the speed overall. I don't want to swap window managers because gnome shouldn't be this slow in the first place and simply swapping to another window manager does not fix the underlying problem.

    Anyways, i'm thinking of giving Gentoo a shot but don't have the manuals etc for my laptop hardware so getting exact info would be difficult.

    Anyways, 1. Does Gentoo have hardware detection at all or do i need to know everything about my hardware ?

    2. Is Gentoo noticibely faster then binary distros ?

    3 . On software installation i know emerge is great but how large is the repositary ? apt-get for fedora is decent but i've found i need to go hunt down the rpm's myself for more exotic packages and i like apt.

    3. b. Does emerge handle dependencies well ? i.e if i hunt down fud.tar and try and install it will emerge be able to get me the dependencies ? or even if i emerge fud.tar off the repository will it get the dependencies automatically ?

    4. plain and simply, any users of gentoo here recommend it ? any problems ? Would anyone recommend something else ?

    Thanks


Comments

  • #2
    ssh
    Closed Accounts Posts: 484 ✭✭ssh


    I can't understand this gentoo thing. It seems great that you can learn how to compile from source, but honestly, it'd take days to compile up a full distro.

    If you want to learn lots, use gentoo. If you want to do stuff, get debian.


  • #3
    nadir
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,419 ✭✭✭nadir


    1. ok so basically you boot the gentoo live cd this tries to automatically detect all your hardware, and usually does a damn fine job at it, there are also boot flags you can specify before the livecd boots fully, all these are listed on the gentoo documentation, which is very comprehensive.

    2. yes and no. Its damn fast, considering you have to specify your cflags, and get to choose exactly what support you want to build with every app, yes its way faster at booting up a gnome enviornment here than mandrake was. Its 30 seconds for my own machine to boot to fluxbox, which I reckon is fast by any standards.

    3. YES! emerge is the bomb, its only ever failed 3 times at compiling for me, 2 of those times were because of dodgy cflags i had, and the other time was due to a reverse dependance problem, which at the time emerge didn't handle, however reverse dependancies are now also supported via the revdep-rebuild application. Also if you ever do get a problem, it is always supported on forums.gentoo.org.
    Emerge rocks because.
    A. Its completely configurable - down to the instruction set.
    B. stable
    C. always up to date. availability of masked (unstable) versions also - like woody.
    D. completely automated.
    E. easy to use - understand: all installed packages are stored in a world file : installation variables are all stored in /etc/make.conf : each package is called an ebuild, and is stored locally - containing all package information : the emerge command basically intermediates between all of these.
    F. in the event that you mess up portage you can regenerate it automatically - regen-world .
    G. thousands of packages - you say with rpm you need to go hunting packages, I rarely find stuff that isn't in portage.
    H. it configures more than just the app, an ebuild is a package, may contain other funky add-ons, andextra configuration, making your life easier.
    I. to give an idea of how powerful portage is. when you have a base system installed, and you are ready to compile all the extra apps, wm media utils .etc. all you have to do is basically type emerge mplayer. because you will have all your use flags set up in make.conf , lets say like what i have USE="X gtk kde gnome alsa" . hit the hay, and when you up, you have everything that you need to get mplayer running. sweet! ww) .
    J. there are lost more - you got to try it.

    4. yes its the way to go for a home machine: if you like *nix, you'll love gentoo . I guess its kind of like the best of debian and bsd combined. It basically provides an easy to use interface to a complete linux system, without loosing any usability. Although there are only a limited number of binary packages available it basically doesnt matter, ok it takes over a day to install it, but you can just go the bed and leave it compiling over night, its only one night, and then you have a seriously stable - fast customised box.

    One of the great assets gentoo has is the awesome documentation - even though it is a 'relatively' complicated install, the instructions are exact and step by step - great learning experience. But by all means give it a shot man, you wont regret ;)


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