Well, I had a spare laptop around the geekflat and I finally decide to try a new operating system on it. I looked around for a while and finally decided upon Gentoo Linux, which is a "high-performance ports-based Linux metadistribution for x86, PowerPC, Sparc and Sparc64 systems".
Why did I pick Gentoo? Well, mostly 'cos it seems up and coming. The packages are very up to date (and it uses a port-style system). The base install is quite minimal (it's a laptop, disk space is important). The fact that it compiles everything specifically for the processor you have (it's a laptop, speed is important). Oh, and it's fairly hardcore, so I get to learn more about Linux.
The installation was a bit tricky. You download a small ISO, burn it to a CD, boot up on it, do all sorts of tricky commands (I had to use fdisk!) and then it downloads and compiles the bootstrap system, and then downloads and compiles the base system. As you can imagine, compiling everything takes a while (I left it going overnight). Oh, and once you have everything set up, you have to download and install you favourite desktop environment and X server. This also takes a while.
But I'm hooked. The resulting system is great. Gnome flies like it never flew before on the laptop. I still have lots of diskspace left. It's very stable and adding software such as Galeon is a simple matter of typing "emerge galeon".
So far I'm very happy. Happy enough that I've decided to try Gentoo on my work box as well. Let's see how that goes.
No more searching the Net for RPMs for me...
I run it on an IBM thinkpad 600. P2/266, 288megs ram, 5gig drive. I had been running Redhat 7.2 on it. X was a nightmare. Slow, unresponsive. You could watch things draw on the screen.
I did a stage1 install of Gentoo on it (That's the compile everything install) and have never looked back.
I use a rather lengthy set of optimizations in make.conf, but the difference is astounding. I now use this machine with XFree 4.2.0, KDE3.0.1, Mozilla 1.0RC1 (from binary, not compiled) and XChat minus gnome. It's amazingly useful, Incredibly responsive, and feels like a machine twice as fast as what it is.
I would recommend that you emerge gentoo-sources and recompile your kernel. The gentoo-sources package is a full set of kernel patches for all that fun stuff you read about. Preempt kernel patch, O(1), latency, all the fun network latency patches. You name it.
Are there downsides? Well, I do prefer SysVinit to the BSD style rc, I've had some problems with the XFS filesystem not playing nice with the preempt patch in gentoo-sources, and just the other night I had a package not compile (gabber, I believe. Failed looking for -lfreetype, even though it was there).
But these are minor. I had left linux for OpenBSD in December. I just couldn't find a dist that I liked. Gentoo has brought me back. It's not a dist I'd use for someone completely clueless, but for someone with some basic unix skills, Gentoo is the dist to beat.
Re:Gentoo
boog on 2002-07-01T20:21:30
I run it on an IBM thinkpad 600. P2/266, 288megs ram, 5gig drive. I had been running Redhat 7.2 on it. X was a nightmare. Slow, unresponsive. You could watch things draw on the screen.
Quite surprised to hear that. I have Redhat 7.0 with Gnome/Enlightenment and all the trimmings running pretty well on a P2/266, 96Mb RAM, 3Gig. Perhaps there's a difference in the video chipsets, but it's just an el cheapo notebook, and I'm quite impressed.
Wouldn't mind trying Gentoo sometime though, but since I have Redhat working as I want, it'll probably be some time!Re:Gentoo
pemungkah on 2002-07-01T21:46:30
I have Gentoo running on my G4 tower here at work; right this moment, I'm running MOL (Mac-On-Linux), happily listening to and watching iTunes in eye-candy mode in one X window while booted up under Linux. It's as fast as it was without Linux, and MOL actually works (which it never did on any other distro).
I'm a happy camper, I am. I can't recommend it enough.
