Speed comparisons

[Lazarus18]

So now that my button emulation Q has been resolved, I am trying to get some testimonials on how Gentoo does on PPC. Right now I have YDL 2.2 on there, and have been pleased with it. I'm trying to decide between reinstalling it, going to Debian (love apt-get) or installing Gentoo (which I have on my x86).

Does Gentoo provide a notable speed bump over my other options? And how hard is it to optimally configure the kernel? I've done it a fair number of times on the x86, but never on PPC and am unfamiliar with the differences.

Thanks all.
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-Rob, Tired med student
Powermac G4 450 MHz (Sawtooth), 756 MB RAM, OS X.1.4
Powerbook G3 400 MHz (Pismo), 192 MB RAM, OS X.1.4, Gentoo Linux
Homebrew Athlon-xp 1800+ MHz, 512 MB DDR-RAM, GeForce 3Ti 500, Gentoo Linux, WinXP

[DocTomoe]

I've been testing all PPC distros (except Debian) till now and none has been as fast and snappy as is Gentoo PPC. Of course, it takes you hell of a time to get it installed, up and running, but once it's set up, you'll be a happy camper.

As for the kernel, of course, it's quite different from x86 (at least on the options to select or not select), but everyone has to start sometime. If you are unable to figure correct settings out, get a precompiled kernel from [URL]ppckernel.org[/URL] or look at one of the sample PPC kernel .config files on TuxPPC. You'll also find a guide on building a PPC kernel on the same page.
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Olivier Reisch doctomoe@gentoo.org
Gentoo/PPC Developer
http://www.gentoo.org
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[kang]

yeah and you'll see that ydl is quite crappy compared to gentoo or debian (altough debian ppc installation is not really easy, nor support (lot, lot of keymap problems, etc) (but debian rox:D=)
also gcc on ppc is SLOW so expect really _long_ installtion for gentoo
(till the cd include gcc 3.1 which improve the stuff a little (not comparable to x86 heavy optimization tough

[Cylaris]

I've had debian ppc installed for over 1.5 years now and I can tell you that I felt the speed difference as soon as I switched to gentoo on my poor g3 400 powerbook.

Also, another benefit of running gentoo is the latest packages! KDE 3.0.1 is running perfectly along with the mosfet plugins and it's faster then what KDE 2.2 was on my debian system.

But like DocTomoe said it takes a while to get it up and running probably took me 2 days of compiling and I had a lot of prebuilt packages curtesey of Gerk to ease the compile time. But I think it was well worth it!