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Tuesday March 25, 2003

Gentoo Linux

A friend hooked me up today with some knowledge I didn't have. He told me about Gentoo Linux, which, according to him, is 3-4 times faster than any current Linux distribution! Wow - that's a LOT faster. This might mean that my 300 MHz, 256 MB (RAM) machine is usable again. Here's some snippets from our IM conversation.

You build from the command line through lynx, then update your kernel through a tool called 'emerge'. Want cvs? type 'emerge cvs'. Want jboss, type 'emerge jboss'. Basically, you emerge what you want and ignore all the rest of the stuff you typically get in a pre-canned, pre-built linux os.
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works great on intel, sun, powerpc and the mac.
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no more rpms and tar balls. just emerge. Each week, if I want to update all the apps I have emerged on my machine, I type, as root, two commands "emerge sync" (updates my portage tree), then, "emerge -u world". This says, look at all the apps I've emerged, and update them. Emerge then finds the tar balls, pulls them down, unpacks, compiles into the kernel and goes onto the next one. Want OpenOffice? 'emerge openoffice' (this takes about 8 hours to compile).

Sounds very cool - has anyone tried it?

Posted in Java at Mar 25 2003, 02:16:32 PM MST 7 Comments
Comments:

I tried out the Live Gentoo CD and it ran well. Never really got around to installing it and running it for an extended time period. I guess it is a change of paradigm just like when RPMs came out (and now with RedHat UpToDate) and people were using tarballs. The fact that everything has to be compiled on install may be an issue when upgrading. But speed vs convenience is a personal preference. I have some links to the Gentoo articles that some of the guys published as well. Just do a Gentoo search on my blog.

Posted by dsuspense on March 25, 2003 at 03:48 PM MST #

I have been running Gentoo exclusively since before version one. While I cannot speak to the "speed increase", I can tell you the distro and all packages are optimized to your machine since they are all compiled from source according to your preferences. As you may imagine, this is a two-edged sword. You get exactly what you want. You have to compile it all. On my old Pentium 166, it gets unbearable sometimes.... On my Athlon, not so much so. I CAN tell you it is too cool for words to build glibc (emerge -u glibc) with X (and KDE) running without having to shut everything down. The Pentium compile problem is so severe (for me) I am looking at setting up a secondary environment on my Athlon to build for the Pentium. Should be interesting....

Posted by Wayne James on March 25, 2003 at 04:09 PM MST #

I'm curious how it's 3-4 times faster. Is it really that much faster (I'd be amazed if it was 2x) simply because you're getting everything built specifically for your machine? I'm a longtime RedHat user, but have been following Gentoo for a little while and am considering it for my next go-around. If it was truly 3-4x faster, that'd be worth it for sure, but again, I'd like to see something that backs up such numbers.

Posted by crb on March 25, 2003 at 06:10 PM MST #

Gentoo Linux is quite nice, but the speed increase is not really noticable. You can compile all your stuff with high optimisation settings, but I think that other distros also compile their stuff with high optimisation settings. And optimizing for athlon is not so different from optimizing for p3. I am running gentoo because I like the always up to date packages it has available. But the compilation times can be really a pain (KDE takes > 10 hours). And if its always compiling something in the background the speed increase is gone, because the compiler takes a lot of cycles. If you want to install on a slow system, but also have one or more faster systems, you could try distgcc, which spreads the load over multiple systems. -chris

Posted by Christoph Sturm on March 26, 2003 at 04:56 AM MST #

Funny enough, I just posted a brief message about Gentoo on my blog. The speedup isn't the major benefit for me: I have had only two or three issues with dependencies, all easily corrected. I've been using RedHat for six years and eventually I'd have a terrible time with RPM dependencies, so much so that I'd do an upgrade just to get everything to play nice. You have to delay immediate gratification though: the install takes a while, especially on a slower machine. Ditto for upgrading major apps like Mozilla. But it's definitely worth it.

Posted by Chris Winters on March 26, 2003 at 11:46 AM MST #

3-4 times faster is a crock. I've been running on Gentoo since May 2002. I would say my "feel" for speedup would be 10-20% faster. I tend to run Gentoo in "unstable" mode where the trade-off is newer packages and less stability (at times).

Posted by Anonymous on March 26, 2003 at 04:05 PM MST #

I am a 2 month old newbie to Linux and I have successfully installed Gentoo on my Sony FX-140 laptop. I think the emerge feature is great, but can take some time to compile big apps. However, you do not have to worry about dependencies as much. I have a desktop system with Red Hat 9 that works well. However, I will be dumping Red Hat the next time they make me take that stupid survey so I can maintain my demo account. GX

Posted by GunmanX on August 10, 2003 at 08:01 PM MDT #

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