On Sun, Dec 04, 2011 at 03:40:01PM +0100, Michael Mol wrote: > On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 8:44 AM, Harry Putnam <rea...@newsguy.com> wrote: > > > For the OP, a few posters have mentioned that under gentoo, every > > thing is compiled from scratch, but it was not made clear that it > > happens again and again at most updates. > > > > No one has made clear that there is a very HUGE amount of time sunk > > into compiling absolutely everything. > > I'd say "bull", but that depends *greatly* on your hardware. When I > talk about Gentoo with my friends, they admit to having tried it, but > then say it took them a long, long time to build a system on their > 486. You don't want to run Gentoo compiles on a 486. You probably > ought not to run Gentoo compiles on any x86 processor older than an > Athlon64 or Intel Core chip. >
I have gentoo on a few machines here, including a Pentium-M powered Thinkpad (single core, 1.7GHz) and a G4 eMac (single core PPC, 1.25GHz). They handle it just fine, though it does take awhile to update of course. Never the "two or three days" people love to cry about, but then I don't use gnome or kde, so maybe it would if I did... As long as I keep them updated weekly, it rarely takes more than four hours and often takes as little as 60-90 minutes. I'm using fvwm these days, in case anyone's curious. Lot of work to set up, but it does everything extremely well once configured. The difference in the performance with gentoo on a lower spec machine does make it pretty worthwhile to suffer the updates, IMO. In fact, I like gentoo and FreeBSD best for low-spoec hardware. YMMV of course... :) -- caveat utilitor ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤
