Posted by: Administrator
on September 19, 2004 03:04 AM
I am a Gentoo convert. Right now, I have a laptop dual-booted XP Home and Gentoo, and two desktops both running Gentoo. All are running the 2.6 kernel except the laptop; I haven't been able to get my Conexant LinModem drivers to work with 2.6 yet.
On the issue of sound and ALSA: OSS works just fine on the 2.4 kernel for most of my systems. ALSA installation on 2.4 isn't particularly difficult, either. There's an excellent guide on the Gentoo documentation web site.
On installation scripts: I wrote those myself in about an hour. The first script formats all the partitions and unpacks CD # 1, the second script unpacks CD 2, the third script does everything that needs to be done at "chroot" time to install the base system, and the fourth installs all the binary packages from the second CD.
I generally install with stage 3 plus *everything* from the i686 second "packages" CD. Total install time for a stage 3 install using the i686 binaries is about three hours on my 1.3 GHz Athlon T-bird, slightly less on a 2.4 GHz P4 and slightly more on the Athlon XP laptop because the hard drive is dog-slow.
There's not all that much that needs to be compiled when you do it this way, and i686 code with the Gentoo-selected default optimizations isn't a lot slower on most functions. Where I do need optimization -- number crunching -- I use higher levels of optimization and architecture-specific flags.
Once I have a stage 3 / Gentoo Reference Platform built from CDs without network, I do an "emerge sync" to update the Portage tree. Then I add the packages I use regularly<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... this adds another few hours for the compiles. Eventually, as packages get updated from the level on the release CDs, they get recompiled, but you get a pretty good system by doing a stage 3 / GRP install off the CDs.
The biggest downside to Gentoo that I've found is the large disk requirement for all the source packages. My "/usr/portage/distfiles" is about 3.5 GBytes and climbing. I've moved it to a separate partition so I can manage it better, and I have a mirror of it on a 20 GB USB hard drive, which makes installs on multiple boxes easy.
The biggest upside to Gentoo that I've found is the quantity and quality of Java-based software. The "other" large community-based distro, Debian, has a somewhat slanted take on the "freedom" of Java and software written in Java. A whole bunch of software I use and like -- the PEPA performance modeling tool, DBDesigner 4, jMAX and other audio software, the Protege ontology software -- is written in Java.
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Re:Gentoo
Posted by: Administrator on September 19, 2004 03:04 AMOn the issue of sound and ALSA: OSS works just fine on the 2.4 kernel for most of my systems. ALSA installation on 2.4 isn't particularly difficult, either. There's an excellent guide on the Gentoo documentation web site.
On installation scripts: I wrote those myself in about an hour. The first script formats all the partitions and unpacks CD # 1, the second script unpacks CD 2, the third script does everything that needs to be done at "chroot" time to install the base system, and the fourth installs all the binary packages from the second CD.
I generally install with stage 3 plus *everything* from the i686 second "packages" CD. Total install time for a stage 3 install using the i686 binaries is about three hours on my 1.3 GHz Athlon T-bird, slightly less on a 2.4 GHz P4 and slightly more on the Athlon XP laptop because the hard drive is dog-slow.
There's not all that much that needs to be compiled when you do it this way, and i686 code with the Gentoo-selected default optimizations isn't a lot slower on most functions. Where I do need optimization -- number crunching -- I use higher levels of optimization and architecture-specific flags.
Once I have a stage 3 / Gentoo Reference Platform built from CDs without network, I do an "emerge sync" to update the Portage tree. Then I add the packages I use regularly<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... this adds another few hours for the compiles. Eventually, as packages get updated from the level on the release CDs, they get recompiled, but you get a pretty good system by doing a stage 3 / GRP install off the CDs.
The biggest downside to Gentoo that I've found is the large disk requirement for all the source packages. My "/usr/portage/distfiles" is about 3.5 GBytes and climbing. I've moved it to a separate partition so I can manage it better, and I have a mirror of it on a 20 GB USB hard drive, which makes installs on multiple boxes easy.
The biggest upside to Gentoo that I've found is the quantity and quality of Java-based software. The "other" large community-based distro, Debian, has a somewhat slanted take on the "freedom" of Java and software written in Java. A whole bunch of software I use and like -- the PEPA performance modeling tool, DBDesigner 4, jMAX and other audio software, the Protege ontology software -- is written in Java.
Ed Borasky
http://www.algocompsynth.com/
#