On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 05:56:20PM +1100, O Plameras wrote: > David Liu Lau wrote: > > >I think I need that level of customisation that Gentoo offers, even if > >its painful. A hand-tuned system is much more likely to satisfy me, > >and once installed shold be blazing fast. Thanks for the feedback > >anyways. > > > > > I like your idea of having complete control over > what one has and what one should not have in > the Kernel configuration. For this Gentoo fits > the profile.
I have several points i'd like to _try_ and make here ;-) With regards to kernel config, almost all distributions fit this profile. Regardless of the distro you choose, building a kernel to suit your current hardware, or to try new/experimental features is not a difficult thing to achieve. It may be tedious at first, but once done, you can carry your .config for a particular kernel version to any distro. Personally, I like to stick to official packages for my particular distribution. If a package is not available, I roll my own. The only part of the system I don't follow this policy on is with the kernel. With regards to Gentoo, people tend to get a little carried away with what it offers as opposed to what _you_ in particular can achieve with it. Systems software, such as the tool-chain tend to require very different compile flags than do application software. There is also a lot of software around that attempts to be optimised in code, using tricks with floating point math, pointer arithmetic or inline assembly, just for example. Some optimisations will break this code, or code that depends on it. Distribution maintainers generally go to great lengths to ensure code is compiled properly for a particular package and the package is usually well tested before mainstream release. Distributions such as Debian take this one step further, breaking this down to package maintainers. Before chosing a distribution such as Gentoo, you really need to stop and ask yourself ;- 1. Do I have the time and patience to read all the relevant documentation, forums, bug reports etc for each and every package? 2. Do I have the knowledge and skills to do a better job than these distribution/package maintainers? 3. Am I prepared to research dependancies for a given package, then compile each with the appropriate set of compiler flags? 4. How does Gentoo really help me in achieving any of the above? (particularly #3) Cheers, Grant -- Kaufman's First Law of Party Physics: Population density is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the keg. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
