Awesome

Story: A Gentoo diary: IntroTotal Replies: 10
Author Content
carpenike

Jun 22, 2006
9:56 AM EDT
Lookin forward to reading the rest of your posts.

I've been using Gentoo for the last 2 years or so, mainly on and off though.

I play Counterstrike and the like, which, unfortunately, doesn't run well at all under Linux.

Getting a laptop next month at some point though, and I plan on installing Gentoo on it... Will be interested to read more about your setup as you go along!
hkwint

Jun 22, 2006
1:24 PM EDT
Thanks, it's nice to hear readers appreciate the article.
tuxchick2

Jun 22, 2006
2:57 PM EDT
I haven't tried Gentoo yet, just haven't had time. But I do use the Gentoo Wiki a lot- it's a great howto resource. Just skip over the Gentoo-specific bits. I'm guessing that Gentoo attracts geekier types, so they write better howtos. :)
grouch

Jun 23, 2006
3:33 AM EDT
Gentoo is destroying the planet! All that heat from Gentoo users endlessly recompiling everything is melting the polar ice caps! Just compiling KDE and OOo by Gentoo users is enough to turn Quebec into a tropical rainforest!
tuxchick2

Jun 23, 2006
7:16 AM EDT
Out here in the desert, it used to be a lush semi-tropical forest. So I'm setting up a Gentoo compilation farm to help bring it back.
hkwint

Jun 24, 2006
6:49 AM EDT
OOo isn't compiled anymore by Gentoo users, just because the sheer amount of time involved: There's precompiled OOo-bin (and mozilla-firefox-bin) now. Yes, it is possible to build it from source, but it's not needed anymore. Also, Sun's JRE can't be compiled (because it ain't open), so that's precompiled also (blackdown_jre isn't by the way).

I once compiled OOo from source, back when I used FreeBSD (it wasn't in the pkg's back then, only in ports), and it was the most annoying compile I ever did, if I'd forget about Opera on OpenBSD. I had to stop several times because of license stuff, and download things myself.

So, as you see, compared to FreeBSD a few years ago, and to OpenBSD, Gentoo is really user friendly!
grouch

Jun 24, 2006
7:19 AM EDT
hkwint:

Admit it, you're a compulsive compiler. You even confess, "On workspace 3, Firefox usually runs, and at the moment I'm trying to compile Konqueror with SMB support, which might also end up on workspace 3." Like all compulsive compiling Gentoo users, you strut your "-march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe -fforce-addr" and drool over USE-flags.

Just remember, parts of the Gentoo Social Contract were derived from the Debian Social Contract. I know that some Gentoo developers used Debian source and patch tarballs to create some Gentoo packages, at least very early on, because I pointed a few of them to those tarballs when they asked.

You Johnny-come-latelies would be nowhere without Debian (hush, Yggdrasil, SLS, and Slackware users)!
NoDough

Jun 24, 2006
7:35 AM EDT
>Admit it, you're a compulsive compiler. You even confess, "On workspace 3, Firefox usually runs, and at the moment I'm trying to compile Konqueror with SMB support, which might also end up on workspace 3." Like all compulsive compiling Gentoo users, you strut your "-march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe -fforce-addr" and drool over USE-flags.

I use Gentoo on a couple of machines. I haven't got a problem. I could stop anytime I want.
jimf

Jun 24, 2006
9:23 AM EDT
> I could stop anytime I want.

The ultimate addict in denial :).
hkwint

Jun 24, 2006
2:15 PM EDT
Quoting:You Johnny-come-latelies would be nowhere without Debian


Only mentioning Debian is not fair in my opinion: One should also mention both LFS and FreeBSD when talking about Gentoo, but apart from that I suppose you're right.

If there were pre-compiled packages for Gentoo with all USE-flags turned on, I'd be glad to use them. Nonetheless, the Genux project, which had exactly this aim, doesn't live anymore, and VLOS is not everything too.

Though Gentoo might owe to Debian, I am very glad there are differences between the two, and so are Debian users probably. For example, Sarge still had inetd (Hey, I'm no grandpa!), and no working compile environment (how can any user live without that?). Furthermore, the rc0.d-rc6.d and so on system is not very pleasant to work with; most users don't need 5 different runlevels. And I wonder if Debian users know all the software that's on their desktops (one of my friends which just started using Debian, didn't even know there was an ftp server running from inetd. Worse, he even didn't know what inetd and the security risks were. I disabled it immediately).

So please stop whining about days that were long ago - when Twix was still called Raiders, when you had spoilers on your carriage and you were hunting animals with spears - the facts of today show Debian's market share is declining, while Gentoo's market share is growing. Of course, that's because of the baby graphics in Ubuntu, but anyway, folks seem to want that stuff and Debian doesn't offer it. Worse, people wait and wait, wait another year for a new Debian release, and then finally find out it installs inetd by default.

And last, but not least, we should not forget that Debian doesn't offer vector optimization for my word processor...

By the way, listening to how you are laughing about USE-flags and compiling, please proceed to http://funroll-loops.org/ I can assure, that's what you want to read!
jdixon

Jun 24, 2006
6:20 PM EDT
> hush, Yggdrasil, SLS, and Slackware users.

Guilty as charged. I originally tried SLS, but could never get it to work, then tried Slackware about 9 months later, and have been a happy Linux user ever since. I never did get to try out Yggdrasil.

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