Should i switch to gentoo ?

[LeavingSuSE]

Hi you gentoo users

Sorry for the long thread ...

I am a frustrated user of SuSE Linux and perhaps the time to leave suse has come. Since suse 6.4 i am using it but with my experiences with 9.1 now it could be the last version. Not that i am afraid of problems - i managed to get everything working the way i want, but
this version is a mess.
X is very slow (no problems i can solve - simply slow). Moving windows with tranparency (Konsole) stutters as if someone 'holds the window with his hands'.

Everything xv related seems to be slow. In earlier versions of suse i could drag mplayer, xine or the window of xawtv very fast without waiting for for the windows to repaint.

There are some things that make me thing to switch to gentoo:

1.Novells acquisition of SuSE
2.Bad performance
3.SuSE patches too much (everything works the 'SuSE' way and not the most other distros way)
4.Very bad experiences with SuSE and 2.6.x Kernel
bad X performance, freezes, sporadic mouseslowdowns etc.

My hardware:
Athlon XP 2000
1 GB Ram
Soundblaster 1024 Player (emu10k1)
MSI KT7 - Chipset VT8363/8365 KT133
Hauppauge WinTV PCI (Bt848 - old chip)

I am not the one that fears the cml. So i bet gentoo would bring me a lot fun to be back to the roots (configuring everything myself).But it wouldn't help me to switch my distro if my problems remain.I know how to configure my hardware, so my problems must be kernel or suse related.

My question:
Do you gentoo users have the same problems with kernel 2.6.x ?
I searched here in the forum but didn't find similar problems.

1.very slow and bad bttv performance - dragging windows is very slow (overlay unusable because Kde windows flicker while moving xawtv or other related windows)

2.Bad mplayer, xine experience - stuttering because of the new schedulers (i tried cfq, as and deadline)

3.Mouse slowdowns (sporadic) - not to solve (no interrupt sharing, no suspicious output of /var/log/messages dmesg or else)

Please help me !
If you can tell me that all my problems above are Suse related i switch to gentoo !

Thanks in advance,
Heiko

[Team_Beast]

I dont know whether your above problems are SuSE related or not. All I can say is that I've been using 2.6.x since its been out with no probs at all. I even used some 2.5 kernels with no problems. I have also had no problems with interactivity on my comp and I dont think I've really seen my machine stutter too much since installing gentoo. Everything in gentoo for me pretty much just works, and if not - these forums are such an amazing resource that any problems I do have, have been fixed within a day.

[JPMRaptor]

The best way to find out is to run Gentoo and see how it works for you. Fortunately they make it easy. You can run from the Live CD version and check out the basic system performance (of course things should only improve for you with a properly tweaked install).
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[LeavingSuSE]

Only a few minutes and you answered me - thanks

I will try gentoo as livecd. Although i read some reviews about gentoo i didn't know that gentoo has a livecd.

thanks,
Heiko

[Keripukki]

Gentoo's LiveCD is text-based only and it is usually more often used for installation. If you're used suse since so old version I assume you are not Linux newbie anymore, so you could try Gentoo

You can even install Gentoo from Knoppix so you can listen you're mp3/ogg files while installing

You wont be dissapointed.

[dalek]

I switched from Mandrake. I got tired of the depency problems. I have not regretted one minute of it either.

I like the upgrade. Emerge sync && emerge -u world. Done. Well maybe etc-update if it changed conf files.

I do wish I could get powstatd to work with my UPS though. It works in Mandrake but not in portage.

Later


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[Corax]

I had no problems with the kernel 2.6 series, too. In opposite, they seem to work better on my system, especially under high load.

Gentoo is a cool Linux distribution. It's a better feeling using it, than using SuSE, that I used recently. One the other hand, you have to spend more time and knowledge into system administration.

[theturner]

I switched from Mandrake 9.1. It was just way too buggy and really sucked. Then i tried SuSE, and i couldn't stand it for more than two hours. I saw that YaST sucked even more than the broken packages on Mandrake.
So, i got myself a fast internet connection and installed gentoo... it just worked, i never had any issues (except for the "sound muted after reboot" thingy), and it went so fast that i even dropped BeOS as my secondary OS.

Don't wait another day! Go install Gentoo right now!

[geordie]

Hi,

I am also a longstanding suse user but I'm afraid you are right about 9.1, it sucks.
Gentoo is really good but remember you are compiling everything yourself - you need patients. e.g. there is no suseconfig - you configure everything yourself.

Gentoo is fun and the forum users are the best there is - your never far from help.

HTH
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geordie
Linux User No 315723

[wilburpan]

I used the 8.x versions of SuSE before I switched to Gentoo. The main reasons I switched was not necessarily due to performance issues per se, but to gain the ability to keep up with up to date versions of packages without waiting for the SuSE RPM packagers to do their thing.

I can't really comment on performance differences between SuSE 9.1 and Gentoo since I haven't tried SuSE 9.1. I thought I saw a noticeable but not huge jump in performance between SuSE 8.1 and Gentoo when I first switched. To put things in perspective, I thought that I got a lot bigger boost in performance after upgrading my RAM from 128 MB to 512 MB.

However, if you don't have any problems with the command line, jump in -- the water's fine! Besides, you can always create a new partition, put Gentoo there, and get rid of SuSE after you're convinced of the superiority of Gentoo.

Oh, and as far as your specific issues with your current setup:

1. No experience with bttv -- sorry.
2. Mplayer runs just fine for me on a 700 MHz P3 laptop with 512 MB RAM in KDE .
3. No mouse problems -- I'm using xorg, not xfree86.
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[Spent]

I tired Suse 9.1 when it came out....it was painfully slow. It just has a lot of 'bells and whistles'. I'm sticking with Gentoo. No more of the 'Linux shuffle' for me.

[dalek]

[LeavingSuSE]

Thanks for all your good comments about gentoo. I did't see them yesterday because my machine was very busy with stage1 ...
Now i am at work.

As some of you stated my experiences with suse 9.1 i am only unhappy to throw the bucks for it away.

My first impressions from gentoo (although i am still at compiling):

I wonder how clean such a buch of software packages compiles.
As i started yesterday i expected several aborts but it runs without a problem. The documentation is great. It is better than every building guidance i had. In most cases docus are obsolete in some places or you have to think a lot how the writer meant something.But not so the gentoo
handbook.

A lot of work was configuring the kernel.The whole networking options - uhh !

I couldn't use genkernel since i want to stay with reiserfs and i don't know if my bt848 based card works with it.

I think it will be a lot of fun in the next time with gentoo.

Thanks for your replies,
Heiko

[ScubaStreb]

I've been a long time Gentoo user. Recently, I got restless and tried Suse 9.0 and Fedora Core 2. Man, big mistake. They were slow and bloated (this coming from a KDE guy). It didn't take long to come back to Gentoo and I don't know why I ever strayed.

I have no problems with the 2.6 kernel. My desktop is incredibly responsive and everything is working (except Juk with gstreamer which is driving me nuts). I also hate aRTs. but that's not a Gentoo problem.

Anyway, I imagine that you'll like Gentoo after the initial learning curve is through. These forums are the best Linux resource out there too!

Cheers!
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[8]

I'm in the process of switching from Debian because Gentoo seems
like it will handle new stuff better than apt. Right now I'm still building
my Gentoo up but I'm pretty sure it's going to be fine. It *has* required
considerable work/learning however...

In order to have a working system available in the transition I altered
the Debian boot loader config to dual boot Gentoo (on the biggest partition!)
just to be on the safe side. If you can do it with SuSE you might want
to try that so you can boot back into it if you really need to get something
done while Gentoo is under construction!

p.s.

Gentoo seems faster to me with a better fundamental design
but what do I know?

[MentalLentil]

I just spotted this

[LeavingSuSE]

the reason is gentoo keeps me awake too long

I have only 4 hours and 17 minutes to sleep until i have to get up for work

It it so exciting - i wonder that my first 2.6 kernel worked (nearly) out of the box. I was lucky to read about i2c_algo_bit here in the forum so after enabling it i found the options for bt848

Wow - what can i say: Everything feels much better than before.

Even the console runs like hell. Kde is very stable and fast.
I couldn't describe the feeling but gentoo feels right. The problems i expected by leaving suse after all that years was wrong:

Yesterday i was baking my kernel and now i have a running kde, tvtime, and so on. Alsa wasn't so hard with that good documentation here.The most things i could solve by searching in the forum.

There are only little problems with the fonts in konqueror - but i will find that out tomorrow.

The aa fonts have a look that the aa fonts under suse had one year (or 2) ago.

I am using truetypes that worked under suse so the fonts can't be the problem.

The worst letter is the 'k'.
xdpyinfo | grep resolution gave me 90 x 96.
I tried startx -- -dpi 96 which gives me 96 x 96 - a little better than before.

If anyone has a hint for me ...


Thanks a lot for replies. I think the gentoo community is a very
good one. Cool helpful people.

So now i have to get some sleep.
Good night (for all people where it is now),
Heiko

[dalek]

[amne]

Moved from Multimedia to Gentoo Chat.

[dalek]

Hey. I didn't have my seat belt on when you did that move.

Give me a warning next time.

Darn whip lash, that hurts!


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My rig: Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P mobo, AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core CPU, ZALMAN CNPS10X Performa CPU cooler,
G.SKILL 32GB DDR3 PC3 12800 Memory Nvidia GTX-650 video card LG W2253 Monitor
60TBs of hard drive space using LVM
Cooler Master HAF-932 Case

[drahz]

YES

gentoo rocks, it does have a learning curve, that's a small price to pay for Gentoo
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[jcmorris]

A SuSE user? I used to be a SuSE fan, and I still think it is great if you just want to get an easy-to-use Linux system up an running quickly without hassle. However, I agree that performance is seriously lagging, not sure why though. Switching to Gentoo, and even setting low optimization flags, will give noticable improvement on desktop performance. Try it out!
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Laptop:
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256 MB RAM

[m0sk]

Lately I've come across a lot of people having bad experience with FC2, Mandrake 10 and now SuSE 9.1. Somehow, I had expected more from the major Linux distro's, it seems this could lead to "bad press" for the 2.6 kernel and Linux in general.

On the other hand, I am personally terribly satisfied with 2.6, as are most of my fellow gentooists I've been running 2.6 for months with no problems whatsoever, and with really good (desktop)performance. My pIII-500 feels faster "as years go by" (I'm coming from SuSE 8.0 -> Gentoo w/ gcc 3.x -> Gentoo w/ kernel 2.6.x and KDE 3.2.x). Oh, and best of all: upgrading without hassle, no fresh install needed (the absolutely worst "feature" of Mandrake, SuSE, and Red Hat, not sure about Fedora ...).
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[LeavingSuSE]

But they are not gentoo problems. I think that are problems with kernel 2.6:

1.bttv / v4l /v4l2 support is not as mature and powerful as in 2.4 kernel.

Try xawtv and drag the window in overlay mode above a kde (whatever) window and you notice that the window moves so slow as if cpu = 100% - but no !
It is still around 96% idle !

If you are interested you can read that here:
http://spinics.net/lists/vfl/msg07673.html
Gerd is the coder of xawtv, maintainer of the v4l /v4l2 drivers (and bttv related things in general)

2.Occasionally after booting my mouse is very slow in X.
If i reboot the chances are high that its fast again.Every 2-3 reboot its slow without any known reason. There are no kernelmessages that could help.
My solution (i am still testing): I appended psmouse_res
olution=200 to my bootoption in grub. Until now i didn't have a slow mouse again.

3.My Pc freezes occasionally when i switch from X to real console. I guess it's because i have comiled in matrox framebuffer to have a higher resolution console with better framerate (85 Hz). In 2.4 that rarely froze my Pc. I could watch framebuffer tv or links with framebuffer support etc.
I found out with google that a lot of people have that with 2.6 and nvidia framebuffer compiled in.I will try to compile in vesa framebuffer support and if that still freezes my box i will drop that feature until its more stable again.

So that aren't gentoo specific problems. I guess the 2.6 still needs some months to get some fixes here and there.
I don't regret my move to gentoo and can't think about installing SuSE again.
The gentoo speed is addictive

[gnuageux]

Gentoos claim to fame is optimization! Give it a whirl, I havent really meet anyone thats tried it and had a bad exp.
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