Do I come back to the fold?

[DougC]

Hi All,

After a while away I've recently started playing around with Linux again.

I had a "quick" try of gentoo from a stage 2 tar ball which went without a hitch (I didn't go as far as emerging KDE), the only thing putting me off is the compile times. Then I tried Suse 9.1 Pro wich is good but I really don't like RPM's for anything more complicated than small single programs I tried upgrading KDE to 3.3 and gave up. I considered using Debian but the latest software only seems to get added with glacial speed.

Currently I'm trying Yoper wich so far seems ok apart from the install which I had a few problems with, it would let me set up a /boot partition you only get an option for swap, / and /home, so I had to do it manually. Other than that it's a very fast distro but it just doesn't seem mature enough yet packages managment seems to be both RPM and apt which seems a bit odd. So I don't know if I shhould stick with Yoper of give somthing else a try.

In the back of my head I just keep hearing the word Gentoo. It seems I probably spend less time compiling under gentoo than I would trying to fix RPM hell under other RPM distro's or waiting for Debian updates. Gentoo just seems so simple (admitidly not the best install, but the instructions are clear and they work).

I suppose I could just emerge pre-built binaries and save time which raises a question: If I installed KDE from the binary CD would a later update recompile it anyway? I may have more time later so that would not really be a problem it's just getting an initial working system up and running. I'll go as far as a stage 2 install to get the OS running but I don't initially want to compile KDE and openoffice my 1.4GHz 256Mb Athlon isn't the fastest of beasts anymore.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. What do you think?

Thanks,
Doug.

[wilburpan]

I run Gentoo on a 700 MHz P3 laptop with 512 MB RAM. I've run Gnome and KDE with compiles running in the background with little impact on how my system runs, so I would say that your CPU is hefty enough to deal with compiling from source. Heck, I've upgraded KDE while running KDE.

The key for me is to be smart about when you do your emerge -u world. I tend to run them before I leave work, so the can compile overnight. For really big emerges, I'll do them over a weekend. Having said that, KDE and OpenOffice have been the longest compiles for me, and each came in at less than 24 hours, so you may not spend as much time compiling as you might think.

I would strongly suggest adding more RAM, though. I've found that for Linux, RAM has a huge impact on how your system runs.
_________________
I'm only hanging out in OTW until I get rid of this stupid l33t ranking.....Crap. That didn't work.

[DougC]

MMMM more RAM and a 80Gb disk just for linux is what I want one day unfortunately I have a super massive black hole called a wife and kids that keeps sucking away my resources as fast as I can make them. But the 256Mb seems to work ok at the mo.

[charlieg]

The compile times won't really bother you if you have 24 hour connectivity and can just do things overnight whilst you sleep.

I'm often away for a few days at a time, so I do my major upgrades then. It's literally a case of starting the upgrade as you go out the door, then coming back to (usually) a shiney new [whatever major upgrade you did].
_________________
Want Free games?
Free Gamer - open source games list & commentary

Open source web-enabled rich UI platform: Vexi