On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 10:29, Jason Greenwood wrote: > Yes, I know, similar on Drake. That doesn't work too well on non-Gentoo > systems now does it? True. > And if you don't want to compile?? Ah. But _you_ don't compile, your computer - directed by the Gentoo .ebuild script - does. You do not have to know one iota about what it's doing. Compiling is nothing to be allergic to, honestly it's no big deal.
> There's the rub. > Different distros, er, strokes for different folks. Indeed, vive la differance. > Compiling all that on a less than modern machine aint exactly going to > be quick now is it? It all depends on how you define "quick", it's going to be a _great deal_ faster - even on a 600MHz machine - than footling around until 03:00am looking for some weird rpm file to d/l. > Took me 5 minutes of downloading over 128K adsl and > then 2 minutes of installing and I was done... =) You conveniently forget the time taken to find the particular file you need, and then fighting all the demons living in rpm hell. Been there, done that, _never_ again. Remember that Linux is an Open _Source_ system. imho binary distributions of it are an anachronism from 10 years ago when the ordinary personal user was lucky to have a 33 Mhz '486 with 8 megs of ram. That sort of machine could not do very much compiling at all. The situation today is that memory and speed are about a 100 times bigger and faster than there were then. Building packages from source is quite practical now-a-days. > Statically linked RPMS > are even better than Gentoo for most smallish programs IMHO. No > dependency hell, just download, install, use. Simple. With modern cheap > hard drives, WHO CARES about library duplication?? I certainly don't!!! For a machine used by a single user I agree completely, but for a machine used concurrently by many users shared object libraries do save massive amounts of still somewhat precious memory. > Cheers > > Jason > > Christopher Sawtell wrote: > > On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 09:53, Jason Greenwood wrote: > >>The setup was straightforward and quick once I found the right info - > >>which took me until 3am (!).... > > > > 3am Egads ( !!! ) > > > > emerge --sync ( approx 10 minutes, paradise cable is nice ) > > emerge vlc ( or xine, or mplayer, or ogle, or kaffeine ) > > Cook and eat dinner. > > Watch film. > > > > Do we need another Gentoo mini-InstallFest? -- Sincerely etc., Christopher Sawtell
