Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
060101 Chris White wrote: On Saturday 31 December 2005 22:35, C. Beamer wrote: Fedora: 3.45 *Gentoo: 3.75* Mandriva: 3.70 Suse: 3.40 Ubuntu: 3.90 Word of advice, things like this are generally flawed. Quite true, but I believe CB's point was simply that Gentoo is up there with the other well-known distros for usability. The best distro for your needs is the one that best suits what you expect your system to do. Again, people out there should know that Gentoo may well be that distro. Gentoo is not difficult, but requires on-going attention input from users: in return, you get a system which you can tune to do just what you want. My own recent experience trying to update the OS in my back-up machine was that Mandriva 2006 wouldn't install, Kubuntu could not be configured, as it refused to recognise the password (it uses the same for user root), while Suse required downloading writing 5 ISO's; Ubuntu, of course, is only for those who are willing to use Gnome. Finally, I got Mandriva 2005 installed working well enough, but only with a lot of time effort (the machine too slow for Gentoo). OTOH I've been using Gentoo in my main box without problems since 031005 have a fully upto-date environment which does just what I want it to do. Gentoo is probably suitable for a lot more users than realise it. -- ,, SUPPORT ___//___, Philip Webb : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Centre for Urban Community Studies TRANSIT`-O--O---' University of Toronto -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Sun, 1 Jan 2006, Philip Webb wrote: 060101 Chris White wrote: On Saturday 31 December 2005 22:35, C. Beamer wrote: Fedora: 3.45 *Gentoo: 3.75* Mandriva: 3.70 Suse: 3.40 Ubuntu: 3.90 Word of advice, things like this are generally flawed. Quite true, but I believe CB's point was simply that Gentoo is up there with the other well-known distros for usability. The best distro for your needs is the one that best suits what you expect your system to do. Again, people out there should know that Gentoo may well be that distro. Gentoo is not difficult, but requires on-going attention input from users: in return, you get a system which you can tune to do just what you want. My own recent experience trying to update the OS in my back-up machine was that Mandriva 2006 wouldn't install, Kubuntu could not be configured, as it refused to recognise the password (it uses the same for user root), while Suse required downloading writing 5 ISO's; Ubuntu, of course, is only for those who are willing to use Gnome. Finally, I got Mandriva 2005 installed working well enough, but only with a lot of time effort (the machine too slow for Gentoo). OTOH I've been using Gentoo in my main box without problems since 031005 have a fully upto-date environment which does just what I want it to do. Gentoo is probably suitable for a lot more users than realise it. How slow is too slow for Gentoo? I'm using Gentoo on a 233MHz laptop. It's not fast, but it's perfectly adequate. Install did take over a week, I'll admit. I'm curious because I seem to do a lot of squeezing the most out of underpowered computers, and Gentoo has been my friend in these projects. I would like to know what conditions are not well suited to Gentoo. Michael -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Sunday 01 January 2006 23:22, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How slow is too slow for Gentoo? I'm using Gentoo on a 233MHz laptop. It's not fast, but it's perfectly adequate. Install did take over a week, I'll admit. I'm curious because I seem to do a lot of squeezing the most out of underpowered computers, and Gentoo has been my friend in these projects. I would like to know what conditions are not well suited to Gentoo. Michael TBH that's a question of, it can be done in any situation, it's simply how willing you are to adjust to those situations. One of the main factor people consider is time. They want the stuff now and they don't want to wait around for things to compile. However, with that inherent approach comes the lack of flexibility in choosing what you don't need, and what you do. Think of postgres/mysql/sqlite for example. All of these provide database functionality, but chances are you're only going to pick one. If you don't use postgresql support, then why add it into various applications, causing both more space and more memory to load. While that example alone might not seem like a lot, consider the different functionalities portage offers the ability to customize through USE flags. After awhile people start to realize that stuff is loaded faster, not because of suped up CFLAGS, but because the parts they stripped out creates faster load time. Now, binary support for portage exists, but it's not as advertised as the true install method. That's because most senior developers consider Gentoo to have always been a source based distro. Anything to make it binary would consider it to be more like debian or some such. Then ANOTHER argument comes into play by people that have mass server deployments. People that have a cluster of 100 systems with the same specs don't want to sit around and compile for each one. Instead they could have a build server that builds the binary packages for the systems, then the systems do the install. That's basically what it comes down to. Time is the main factor that draws people away. However I personally consider this a side effect, and have no problem letting emerge -u world do its thing overnight. Chris White pgpPQjBaCxDYF.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Sun, 1 Jan 2006 06:22:14 -0800 (PST), [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm curious because I seem to do a lot of squeezing the most out of underpowered computers, and Gentoo has been my friend in these projects. I would like to know what conditions are not well suited to Gentoo. I think the wetware is more important than the hardware. The willingness to look for, read and follow instructions is the most important requirement. -- Neil Bothwick Don't put all your hypes in one home page. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How slow is too slow for Gentoo? I'm using Gentoo on a 233MHz laptop. It's not fast, but it's perfectly adequate. Install did take over a week, I'll admit. I'm curious because I seem to do a lot of squeezing the most out of underpowered computers, and Gentoo has been my friend in these projects. I would like to know what conditions are not well suited to Gentoo. Michael I have Gentoo on a old Compaq Server, it's in my sig below, and at the time I installed it, it only had one CPU. It took me a few hours to get to a console prompt. It has no GUI, no monitor either. It runs great by the way. [EMAIL PROTECTED] / # uptime 04:14:46 up 20 days, 5:23, 1 user, load average: 4.00, 4.00, 4.00 [EMAIL PROTECTED] / # I shut it down only when a storm is coming. I only have a UPS for my desktop system. I had rude shutdowns. It runs folding and that is it. All that said, I would like to see Gentoo on a 75MHz rig. That would be fun to watch KDE compile on. LOL What, maybe a month or two, at least. LOL Dale :-) -- To err is human, I'm most certainly human. I have four rigs: 1: Home built; Abit NF7 ver 2.0 w/ AMD 2500+ CPU, 1GB of ram and right now two 80GB hard drives. Named Smoker 2: Home built; Iwill KK266-R w/ AMD 1GHz CPU, 256MBs of ram and a 4GB drive. Named Swifty 3: Home built; Gigabyte GA-71XE4 w/ 800MHz CPU, 224MBs of ram and a 2.5GB drive. Named Pokey 4: Compaq Proliant 6000 Server w/ Quad 200MHz CPUs, 128MBs of ram and a 4.3GB SCSI drive. Named Putput All run Gentoo Linux, all run folding. #1 is my desktop, 2, 3, and 4 are set up as servers. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
060101 Chris White wrote: On Sunday 01 January 2006 23:22, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How slow is too slow for Gentoo? I'm using Gentoo on a 233MHz laptop. Install did take over a week, I'll admit. One of the main factor people consider is time ... ... Time is the main factor that draws people away. Exactly ! I really don't have over a week to spend updating a back-up box ! Esp as I have only 1 monitor, so can't use the regular machine meantime ! -- ,, SUPPORT ___//___, Philip Webb : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Centre for Urban Community Studies TRANSIT`-O--O---' University of Toronto -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
Philip Webb wrote: 060101 Chris White wrote: On Sunday 01 January 2006 23:22, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How slow is too slow for Gentoo? I'm using Gentoo on a 233MHz laptop. Install did take over a week, I'll admit. One of the main factor people consider is time ... ... Time is the main factor that draws people away. Exactly ! I really don't have over a week to spend updating a back-up box ! Esp as I have only 1 monitor, so can't use the regular machine meantime ! Of the four machines I have, three are updated over ssh, no monitor at all. Rigs are below. I can even start the updates and then shutdown my main rig, that has the monitor. I login and start a screen session, then start the updates. If I plan to shutdown my main rig for some reason, I do the -f option first since the souces are on my main rig. If I need to shutdown my main rig, I just exit the screen session and logout. I can login later and re-attach the session to see how it's going. Maybe there is something different about my old Compaq but I don't think it would take me that long, even with one CPU. My install went pretty quick and I did compile everything. I even did a emerge -ev world to make sure. Maybe I just hate Mandrake to much. LOL Please don't tell me I have to install Mandrake ever again. PLEASE ! Also keep this in mind, good things come to those who wait. To me, Gentoo is worth waiting for. Dale :-) -- To err is human, I'm most certainly human. I have four rigs: 1: Home built; Abit NF7 ver 2.0 w/ AMD 2500+ CPU, 1GB of ram and right now two 80GB hard drives. Named Smoker 2: Home built; Iwill KK266-R w/ AMD 1GHz CPU, 256MBs of ram and a 4GB drive. Named Swifty 3: Home built; Gigabyte GA-71XE4 w/ 800MHz CPU, 224MBs of ram and a 2.5GB drive. Named Pokey 4: Compaq Proliant 6000 Server w/ Quad 200MHz CPUs, 128MBs of ram and a 4.3GB SCSI drive. Named Putput All run Gentoo Linux, all run folding. #1 is my desktop, 2, 3, and 4 are set up as servers. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
Philip Webb wrote: 060101 Chris White wrote: On Saturday 31 December 2005 22:35, C. Beamer wrote: Fedora: 3.45 *Gentoo: 3.75* Mandriva: 3.70 Suse: 3.40 Ubuntu: 3.90 Word of advice, things like this are generally flawed. Quite true, but I believe CB's point was simply that Gentoo is up there with the other well-known distros for usability. Exactly! :-) This rating was derived from the author's personal experience. Personally, I think that Gentoo is the best from my experience. It does have a bit of a learning curve (but because of the things I've learned, I appreciated that learning curve), but I figure if you give it a chance and can live with the long builds, it's rating is well deserved. The best distro for your needs is the one that best suits what you expect your system to do. Again, people out there should know that Gentoo may well be that distro. Gentoo is not difficult, but requires on-going attention input from users: in return, you get a system which you can tune to do just what you want. My own recent experience trying to update the OS in my back-up machine was that Mandriva 2006 wouldn't install, Kubuntu could not be configured, as it refused to recognise the password (it uses the same for user root), while Suse required downloading writing 5 ISO's; Ubuntu, of course, is only for those who are willing to use Gnome. Finally, I got Mandriva 2005 installed working well enough, but only with a lot of time effort (the machine too slow for Gentoo). OTOH I've been using Gentoo in my main box without problems since 031005 have a fully upto-date environment which does just what I want it to do. Gentoo is probably suitable for a lot more users than realise it. I couldn't have said this better myself! :-) As I said in my original post, I've used all these distros with the exception of Suse. I have the most experience with Redhat and Fedora and *personal opinion*, I would use Gentoo over any of them. Sure, all distros have their good points and bad and it all comes down to what works best for the person using it (as Chris pointed out). I didn't intend that this should be a written in blood evaluation. I just wanted to point out that a technical writer rated it well within a group of well known distros when this would surprise a lot of people (not necessarily Gentooists) and I thought you guys might find it interesting. And surely you guys must agree the the Documentation rating (this was a 5 for Gentoo, and the highest) is right on! Even an idiot like me can follow this documentation and produce a favourable end result. Happy New Year! :-) Colleen -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
Greetings, I am new to Gentoo user. I have been using Linux since slackware was the only distro. I had been using Red Hat for many years until Red Hat until they out grow the desktop users. I tried Mandrake for a while and found it was a pain to upgrade applications or install new applications because of version shew of GTK, etc. Then other things would break. I had stayed away from Gentoo because of the high maintains. But I couldn't find anything else that seem to fit my needs. So I gave Gentoo a go and have regretted it every since. Regretted not doing it years before that is. I can understand why it is a distro for experts. First it takes away too long to compile everything and configuring the kernel isn't for a linux newbee either. That is the downside, the upside is that you only have to do it once. Then you can keep everything up to date with emerge. So far I have installed 3 systems with Gentoo and I am going to try to make it the standard at my company. The tools are great! emerge, rc-update, etc-update, etc. I am a very happy user. -- Darryl Wagoner - WA1GONEvil triumphs when good men do nothing.- Edmund Burke [1729-1797]
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Sun, 1 Jan 2006 09:50:42 -0500, Philip Webb wrote: Exactly ! I really don't have over a week to spend updating a back-up box ! Esp as I have only 1 monitor, so can't use the regular machine meantime ! What's wrong with using ssh and screen? -- Neil Bothwick If at first you don't succeed, give up. No use being a damn fool. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
060101 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sun, 1 Jan 2006 09:50:42 -0500, Philip Webb wrote: I really don't have over a week to spend updating a back-up box ! Esp as I have only 1 monitor, so can't use the regular machine meantime ! What's wrong with using ssh and screen? I don't have a home network, just 2 machines + 1 monitor. There's also only 1 ADSL connection, so I can't use the Internet. No, I'm not going out to buy more hardware. Am I missing something ? -- ,, SUPPORT ___//___, Philip Webb : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Centre for Urban Community Studies TRANSIT`-O--O---' University of Toronto -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Sun, 1 Jan 2006 12:40:55 -0500, Philip Webb wrote: What's wrong with using ssh and screen? I don't have a home network, just 2 machines + 1 monitor. There's also only 1 ADSL connection, so I can't use the Internet. No, I'm not going out to buy more hardware. Am I missing something ? A cable at least, a cable and two cheap NICs at most :) Networking the two would enable you to use the second machine as a backup server, reducing the risk of needing to use it as your main box. -- Neil Bothwick What's this script doing? unzip ; touch ; finger ; mount ; gasp ; yes ; umount ; sleep signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Sunday 01 January 2006 19:53, Neil Bothwick wrote: No, I'm not going out to buy more hardware. Am I missing something ? A cable at least, a cable and two cheap NICs at most :) Networking the two would enable you to use the second machine as a backup server, reducing the risk of needing to use it as your main box. And it would make possible the use of the ssh+screen combination described before. Moreover, it would make possible to share the ADSL line between the two boxes, so they could be connected to Internet both at the same time. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Sun, 1 Jan 2006 14:41:28 -0500, Philip Webb wrote: Really, some of us believe computers are working machines, not toys, we try to keep our systems simple, reliable useful. Which is why I mentioned that by networking the two, you could also use the second machine as a backup server. I do this because my working machines have to keep working. All backups are automated, from one machine to the other. If something fails I have immediate access to all software, configurations and, most importantly, data. My home directory is backed up hourly, so recovering from a failure should not take much longer than that. -- Neil Bothwick An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure, and has a lower TCO, than linux. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
Hello and Happy New Year to all, I am so enamoured with Gentoo that I couldn't resist passing on this bit of trivia. O'Reilly recently published a book called Linux Desktop Pocket Reference. The first chapter is available for viewing on the O'Reilly website and in that chapter the author rated, from his personal experience, 5 distributions under the following categories in the process of getting Linux on the desktop: Installation, Configuration, Program Installation, Documentation (Gentoo rated 5 here, which is *totally* understandable and deserving), and finally gave a weighted average for these. The weighted averages for the 5 distros were: Fedora: 3.45 *Gentoo: 3.75* Mandriva: 3.70 Suse: 3.40 Ubuntu: 3.90 I've used all of these distros with the exception of Suse and can understand why Ubuntu rated slightly higher than Gentoo. I found it very easy to get it installed and for me, it detected all my hardware and configured everything without a glitch. However, I find it interesting to note that Gentoo scored the 2nd highest when it's supposed to be one of the most difficult distros to get installed. I admit, I did suffer some growing pains when installing Gentoo, but I still think it's the greatest because of the control it gives me and I have learned a lot about things like compiling the kernel in the process. Gentoo rocks! Regards, Colleen -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] A Bit of Trivia
On Saturday 31 December 2005 22:35, C. Beamer wrote: Fedora: 3.45 *Gentoo: 3.75* Mandriva: 3.70 Suse: 3.40 Ubuntu: 3.90 Word of advice, things like this are generally flawed. The best distro for your needs is the one that best suits what you expect your system to do. Chris White pgpunEHHKYOzF.pgp Description: PGP signature
