Gentoo (was: ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora)

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 09:04:46PM -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> On 2/26/07, Dan Miller <rambi.dev at gmail.com> wrote:
> >Whats scarier? vim /etc/config_file.config or kate
> >/etc/config_file.config? Its not that scary, you don't need to edit many
> >many config files.
> 
>  "Scary" from the point of view of P17T [1].
> 
> 1. PDOTLREBTWWLLAPACTT [2]
> 2. People doing ordinary tasks, like reading email, browsing the web,
> writing letters, looking at pictures, and calculating their taxes.
> 
> >Its not that scary. I've automated most commands I do.  I have a nightly
> >cron that syncs the portage, then runs emerge -upD world (check
> >everything in my world file and its dependicies to see if there are any
> >updates). The output of this and glsa-check -tv all (check to see if any
> >install packages have security issues). The output of these are then
> >emailed to me every morning. I also have a logwatch report that comes to 
> >me.
> 
>  ...
> 
>  Thanks for making my point for me.  ;-)
> 
>  I have no idea what most of that means, and *I'm* a certified geek.
> Now, I'm sure I could figure it out, given time and manuals and
> Google.  But I do this kind of crap for a living.  P17T would be
> terrified by the above.  :)
> 
> >I open up the CLI to run emerge, ssh, and various other commands. The
> >CLI is faster in some ways than any gui.
> 
>  I agree.  I'm a command-line junkie.  But P17T insist on using GUIs.
> Partly because it's what they're used to.  Partly because they do
> enable easy exploration of the unknown.
> 
> >Emerging OpenOffice took me about 3 hours, thats on a dual-core dual
> >proc Opteron 2800SE with 4 gigs of ram.
> 
>  Yikes.  I tremble to think of how long it would take on the 1200
> MHz, 256 MB box I was running at home eight months ago.  Still, that's
> useful as hard data; thanks for offering it.  :)

A full build, from the ground up, using no binary packages, of the
things that I felt I needed to get *started* in Linux (no gnome, no
openoffice -- evilwm, vim, xterm, firefox, gkrellm, and the things
needed to support them) took about 2 days on my 1600Mhz p4 with 512MB of
RAM. During most of that time, I had access to vim/irssi and some other
console stuff I grabbed early, but no GUI. The biggest time was X, iirc,
in the 4-6 hour range.

OpenOffice compiles tended to take on the order of 8-12 hours, depending
on what else I had going on on the machine. Eventually, I learned about
the OO-bin packages (I think they were relatively new at the time) and
started using them, along with firefox-bin packages.

However, the Gentoo install CD has all of the binary packages you need,
so if you do things right, you can install everything from binary
packages the first time, get things to where you want to, and then start
the painful compiles later. (This was difficult enough that I didn't
know how to do it the first time I installed Gentoo.)


http://bash.org/?464385 

This is still an accurate represntation of my memory (4 years ago now,
mind you) of installing Gentoo. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer