Harry Putnam wrote:
different. But for now, I end up wanting to use emerge but can't because of these massive chunks of time needed to compile things like mozilla or kde. Not sure I understand why binaries for such things aren't commonly used.
IMHO, use the '-bin' (binary) packages for mozilla, firefox, and openoffice. They are usually available, and work pretty good. On my 1.6GHz PentM, OOo
takes about 4-5GB of filespace (tmp) and a day. Not worth it to me.
I don't think KDE packages are avail with a binary package.
Just because you use Gentoo doesn't mean you can't use binary packages. Some are in portage, and some are not.
And yes, the install takes days of tweaking. But look it at as an investment. Unlike other OS's (e.g. Fedora), you'll only need to install Gentoo *once* and still be up2date.
About once a week I run:
# emerge --sync # emerge -a --update world
And go to bed. In the morning it's usually done.
And/or you can be pragmatic and say that both kde and OO only get updated every 2-4 months... In any case, what needs to be realised is that if you do weekly or by-weekly sync+updates then you never have to wait that long. It is when you get complacent and don't do it for 6-8 weeks that you can get emerge worlds taking a day (excepting kde and OO of course).
In general, the question is a little poorly put - gentoo people (generally) like to be up-to-date, and will spend sometimes ridiculous amounts of time to be that way. If you just want all the benefits of portage and don't want to spend silly amounts of time - then don't! Just be satisfied with 6 week old packages and do an emerge world every couple of months before going to bed. This will require making sure that you have enough space for things like OO and kde to compile (well OO anyway) but with disk space as cheap as it is... I now sync only every month or so and spend very little time on system maintenance. I still run a 2.6.8 for pete's sake! ;-).
Cheers Antoine -- [email protected] mailing list
