quote: Original post by noVum
Why would you want to do a LFS, when you can do the same thing with Gentoo without having to download and compile everything yourself?

Why would you want to use Gentoo when you can do the same thing with any other distro without having to compile everything yourself? There can be a lot of reasons.

I personally think that Gentoo has a very good marketing team and is mostly about hype, but then a lot of people will disagree with me and/or think the same about whatever distribution I''m using. My point being: everybody has different needs and tastes, and some distros will meet them better than others.


Hope this helps.

Why is Gentoo a hype? It's basically nothing else than LFS, but instead of "download ./configure ./make ./make install" you just emerge the package.

It is right that other distributions will fit better in many cases, but if you want LFS then Gentoo is a good idea.

[edited by - noVum on November 27, 2003 10:09:20 AM]

I wouldn''t say Gentoo is entirely hype. It''s true that some people who use it simply hype it, but I actually find it to be a good, solid distribution. Not because it''s "faster," because believe me, it''s not unless you use Intel''s compiler at full optimization with a Pentium 4, none of which I have. Instead, it''s because the full operating system is designed well (no, I''m not talking about the kernel, I''m talking about the entire interaction of everything). Unlike some other linux distros, you don''t have quite so many problems. At least, that''s how it''s been in my experience.

The Artist Formerly Known as CmndrM

http://chaos.webhop.org

My reasoning for LFS is simple - Gentoo is too big to use for my purposes. A media player doesn''t need a compiler or the portage tree, I can''t use uClibc with Gentoo (glibc only), and I don''t want to use bash. I can tweak the system to be as small as I want; the compiler optimizations are merely a bonus.

My goal is to get the whole thing to fit on a 64MB flash card; preferably a 32MB card.

I wouldn''t use an LFS system for my main system; that''s what Gentoo is for. Once you get it built, you don''t have to do much beyond emerge -u world every now and then to keep things updated. Except for the compile times, it''s an incredibly nice system.

why are you trying to get it on a 64mb flash card?

gentoo is about choice and therefore you can choose to do 36 hour installations or you can choose to do 1 hour binary installs

if you don''t want to do 36 hour compiles then you still have *choice* to use binaries

i can get a full operating system up with gnome and all my favorite programs in <60minutes and the best thing is i choice everyone of the programs , there''s not a single useless program on my system.

besides common bash programs they don''t even have links/lynx or vim installed unless you emerge it.

although i like the sound of using intel''s compiler ill give it a try some time.

***

from my personal experience when i first started up using linux (only 3-4 weeks ago) it was funny because if i got redhat up and installed... the only i knew how to do was use the mouse and click like windows but when i reached command/line i immediatly troubled when i couldn''t even do a "dir"

although doing the gentoo installation tought me a lot of knowledge and by the time i had it running (5 days to have an installation i was actually confortable with and sound) i had learnt so much i was flying away in gnome-terminal :D

good-luck and don''t make us your personal gentoo advertisers.... if you want to use it - then do it im not trying to convince anyone

quote: Original post by noVum
Why is Gentoo a hype? It''s basically nothing else than LFS, but instead of "download ./configure ./make ./make install" you just emerge the package.

It is right that other distributions will fit better in many cases, but if you want LFS then Gentoo is a good idea.

My main grief with Gentoo is with what its developers seem to consider optimization. They seem to think that 64 bit is better (read "faster" than 32 bit in all domains, and that -O3 will invariably result in faster binaries.

I know that you can easily tweak that, and that you are actually encouraged to do so, but most newbies to GNU/Linux who use Gentoo appear to assume that their system compiled with the default flags will outperform everything. I guess it''s just getting on my nerves .

However, I''m certainly not bashing Gentoo. It certainly has its uses and merits, just like any other distro out there. I was merely pointing out that LFS can have its uses also (if only for the sake of learning something different), though I probably did so in an aggressive way. Sorry about that.

quote: Original post by Strife
I wouldn''t say Gentoo is entirely hype. It''s true that some people who use it simply hype it, but I actually find it to be a good, solid distribution. Not because it''s "faster," because believe me, it''s not unless you use Intel''s compiler at full optimization with a Pentium 4, none of which I have. Instead, it''s because the full operating system is designed well (no, I''m not talking about the kernel, I''m talking about the entire interaction of everything). Unlike some other linux distros, you don''t have quite so many problems. At least, that''s how it''s been in my experience.

I haven''t used Gentoo enough to be able to comment on that. My first impression was quite satisfying overall though.

My problem with source based distros is that packages like bind or sendmail will have to be patched and built quite frequently. If you install them in binary form, you lose any benefit of a source based distribution. If you don''t, you can''t really maintain a park of heterogeneous systems (different versions of the OS and its packages, as well as different kinds of hardware) up to date. The only possible solution in this case is to build everything with generic flags, but here again, you lose any benefit associated to source based systems.

How does Gentoo address this issue, if at all?


Hope this helps.

Thanks for the input guys. Do any of you use it on your main machine for programming games/apps? How is it as a developement environment? And how would it compare to debian? I am not sure how debian works. It seems like it is like gentoo but with a different emerge feature.

Thanks

Debian''s package management system is similar to gentoo in the way it''s used (apt-get install packagename instead of emerge packagename), but different because it downloads binaries, and Gentoo''s portage downloads source, which it then compilies.

I didn''t really use Debian for too long, so if anyone notices anything I got (or missed out) feel free to correct me

Yeah, Debian and Gentoo are both very comparable. The major difference is that Debian (by default) installs binary packages whereas Gentoo (by default) installs source packages. Both systems are very stable, and are generally viewed as being distributions to be used by people with extensive Linux experience.

Personally, I don''t think you really need to have any previous Linux experience, though, as long as you have the time and desire to learn it.

Overall, I think that Gentoo is one of the best options out of the distributions available.

The Artist Formerly Known as CmndrM

http://chaos.webhop.org

IDE .. for linux... ? i guess you could use kdevelop or anjuta or something

although i think i can say the majority of linux programmers use Vim which is an editor, programmer under linux is very different than windows mostly because of GNU Guidelines.