Re: [Pan-users] SSL on Pan 137

[Duncan]

Ed Fletcher posted on Sat, 19 May 2012 22:24:21 -0300 as excerpted:

> I tried Gentoo a long time ago.  Like ten or twelve years, I think,
> maybe more.  The only thing I can remember from that experience is that
> after four or five days of compiling absolutely everything multiple
> times, I never did get a system that I could use.  I would think that
> it's a lot better now.

FWIW, much has changed since then... in all of Linux, and in computers in 
general.  Quad-cores with 8 gigs RAM are almost standard, now days, 
parallel makes are standard as well, and they GREATLY speed up the build 
process.  I first switched to gentoo with a dual socket first gen opteron 
and a gig of ram, and remember kde (alone) taking about a day (8-ish 
hours) to build and install.  Now days (with the same mobo and dual-
socket, but upgraded to top-of-their-line dual-core opteron 290s, so 2x2-
core, with six gig ram, with the scratch build space in in tmpfs/ram as 
well)  I do an a kde upgrade in about two hours, three for the first in a 
series (4.x.0 except that I've been running the betas and rcs recently as 
well, so 4.(x-1).80) or if something goes wrong that I need to fix and 
redo some of the builds that failed as a result.  2-3 hours means I can 
do other things that day as well.  And a full emptytree world rebuild is 
only about a day.

The first gentoo install I tried wasn't quite 10 years ago yet, 2004.0.  
But it was the first one to have NPTL (now standard, native POSIX 
threading libraries, instead of the old Linux-threads), and I was trying 
to build directly to it, and failed.  So I stuck around on the lists and 
answered questions where I could for a couple months, learning all the 
time, and I still don't know what they fixed but 2004.1 installed just 
fine. =:^)

Now days of course they have automated weekly-updated stage-three 
snapshot builds.  I've done a couple of those, one in a 32-bit chroot on 
my main machine, building for my gen 1.5 acer aspire one netbook (before 
the netbooks switched to that stupid chipset with the graphics Intel 
outsourced and thus couldn't do proper freedomware drivers for), a couple 
for a friend.  Stage-3 builds are much easier, and the weekly snapshots 
means that they're pretty current, too.  For stable users (I always run ~/
testing, here), it means that first rebuild is generally the same version 
or a very small update, and "just works".

But I never tried gentoo on a single-core under a gig of ram (except on 
my netbook, but I build for it in a chroot on my quad-core) and I'd not 
recommend it.  Even dual-cores require a lot of patience, and you really 
do want a gig per core these days, so a dual-core should be two-gigs, 
minimum, ram-wise.  The quad-core with 6 gigs on my main rig is quite 
reasonable.  Below that, you'll need quite a bit of patience, and below 
dual-core w/ 2 gig ram, I'd not recommend for newbies at all, unless 
they're masochists.  Unless you have a bigger machine to build on as I do 
for my netbook, that's binary distro territory.  But on a modern quad-
core, 4+ gigs ram, I'd argue that an automated build-from-source like 
gentoo is ideal, the best of both worlds, the flexibility of building 
from source, with the automation of setting it up the way you want and 
then upgrades are less trouble than they'd be elsewhere, as the builds 
might take a bit more time but they're all automated, and the rolling 
release bit means a few upgrades at a time, no huge new distro version 
flag-days where you never know what broke that which was working just 
fine, before.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman