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Gentoo Linux - Long @$$ complile times?!?

P

Praetor

Diamond Member
I've been fighting with getting Gentoo on my box as a dual-boot this weekend without much luck. I think it mainly has to do with the fact that I keep messing something up with GRUB, but that's neither here nor there.

I decided to dick around with it in VMWare (yay for this most excellent piece of software!) and had it update every package before the install (using the CONFIG_PROTECT="-*" emerge -u system script). And it's been working for about 5 hours now. Thank the Maker it's in a window so I can still use my computer.

Just thought I'd complain to the world about the long ass wait I've still got left. 😛
 
Just to give you an idea my xp2000+ 512mb ram took about 8-9 hours to get from a stage3 tarball to a working gnome desktop.
 
Originally posted by: chsh1ca
And to give you an idea, he wasted 8 1/2 hours installing Gentoo... 🙂
Click to expand...

Actually, I didn't. Once I got everything working its solid as a rock. I love it, it is so easy to install something, just type emerge whatever, go grab a beer and before you know it your program is up and running.

And by going through the install process I actually learned quite a bit about Linux, and it was by far the most satisfying experience I have ever had when installing an OS.
 
2 definate big strengths with Gentoo. Emerge is great and matches the legalities.... (think about why Redhat only has to release free srpms of it's enterprise-level distros...)

Now if Gentoo can figure out a good way for it's package mantainers to match the quality of ones that use Debian, then it would have a good thing going. 😛

EDIT:

Oh ya, it's going to take forever to compile gentoo in vmware. Since it's a emulator, or whatever, you get a huge performance penalty for running high-cpu utilization stuff on it. Compiling a entire OS is one of them. On a very fast machine it takes 3 hours to install Gentoo, probably more to get it done completely with all the extra apps that you use...

Debian would definately be a better choice for VMWARE-based OS. You should look into Gentoo's thing-that-I-can't-remember-name-off were you can get pre-compiled packages for. That way you can avoid 90% of the compile time and still get Gentoo.
 
Originally posted by: Haden
Just think about speed gains, wasn't it worth that time? 🙂
Click to expand...

Read some benchmarks. Gentoo is no faster than the other distros. It amuses me that gentoo users think the people who compile other distros are too stupid to use -O2 and -fomit-frame-pointer, etc.

<obligatory debian troll>

edit: my sarcasm meter is broken 😉
 
Originally posted by: CTho9305
Gentoo is no faster than the other distros. It amuses me that gentoo users think the people who compile other distros are too stupid to use -O2 and -fomit-frame-pointer, etc.
Click to expand...
I've heard anecdotal evidence from several people that Gentoo is considerably faster on the desktop, especially on low end hardware (<300mhz CPU).
Also, the people that compile other distros may use some optimization CFLAGS, but they generally don't use processor or processor family specific flags (e.g. -mcpu, -march). Personally, I have not noticed that Gentoo is any faster than Slackware or SuSE, but I do like the flexibility of the emerge system. For example, I like mouse gestures in Mozilla and Firebird, so I can edit the ebuild file to include the patch that lets me use right click to do them, and just run emerge, and it will be built and installed by the emerge system. I wouldn't be able to use Debian's apt system to do this.
 
Originally posted by: decode
Originally posted by: CTho9305
Gentoo is no faster than the other distros. It amuses me that gentoo users think the people who compile other distros are too stupid to use -O2 and -fomit-frame-pointer, etc.
Click to expand...
I've heard anecdotal evidence from several people that Gentoo is considerably faster on the desktop, especially on low end hardware (<300mhz CPU).
Also, the people that compile other distros may use some optimization CFLAGS, but they generally don't use processor or processor family specific flags (e.g. -mcpu, -march). Personally, I have not noticed that Gentoo is any faster than Slackware or SuSE, but I do like the flexibility of the emerge system. For example, I like mouse gestures in Mozilla and Firebird, so I can edit the ebuild file to include the patch that lets me use right click to do them, and just run emerge, and it will be built and installed by the emerge system. I wouldn't be able to use Debian's apt system to do this.
Click to expand...

I've not noticed any difference in terms of speed(neither for better nor worse) on any of the rigs I've ran it on, a P3-866/512 MB and an AXP-2.0 GHz/512 MB.
I agree though, flexibility is a great advatage of Gentoo.

Also, being able to install it on an nForce2 board without pulling my hair out is nice, something I can't say about Debian 🙂
 
Originally posted by: decode
I've heard anecdotal evidence from several people that Gentoo is considerably faster on the desktop, especially on low end hardware (<300mhz CPU).
Click to expand...
Of course, but it will always stay anecdotal. Gentoo is basically a dumb idea that just happens to be centered on a great package management system.

Also, the people that compile other distros may use some optimization CFLAGS, but they generally don't use processor or processor family specific flags (e.g. -mcpu, -march). Personally, I have not noticed that Gentoo is any faster than Slackware or SuSE, but I do like the flexibility of the emerge system. For example, I like mouse gestures in Mozilla and Firebird, so I can edit the ebuild file to include the patch that lets me use right click to do them, and just run emerge, and it will be built and installed by the emerge system. I wouldn't be able to use Debian's apt system to do this.
Click to expand...
Of course, if you actually compiled it from source yourself, you'd also have this option. I swear by compiling from source, not for the 'speed gains' which are incredibly minimal at best, but rather for the level of control I have over the process.

 
Originally posted by: chsh1ca
Of course, if you actually compiled it from source yourself, you'd also have this option. I swear by compiling from source, not for the 'speed gains' which are incredibly minimal at best, but rather for the level of control I have over the process.
Click to expand...
So you like control. You like compiling from source. But you don't like a system that helps you do that more easily? That's the only thing I like about Gentoo. Trying out a new program, or upgrading an old one is an order of magnitude less time consuming than if I have to find all of the sources (for the program and dependencies) myself and compile them by hand, but I still have the control that compiling myself allows.
 
Originally posted by: CTho9305
Originally posted by: Haden
Just think about speed gains, wasn't it worth that time? 🙂
Click to expand...

Read some benchmarks. Gentoo is no faster than the other distros. It amuses me that gentoo users think the people who compile other distros are too stupid to use -O2 and -fomit-frame-pointer, etc.

<obligatory debian troll>
Click to expand...

Hence the smile... It's called sarcasm...
 
Well I got rid of Win2K off my secondary Celeron 300 machine on Friday night and I've been slowly building a good Gentoo install since. As you can imagine the compile times are a nightmare (i.e. a kernel compile takes just over 3 hours) and its been installing Gnome since about 6pm last night but so what? It's only a secondary machine so if it has to sit there for days crunching source code so be it. I'm sure once its all up and running I'll end up stating again from scratch a couple days/weeks later when I've learnt a bit more.

At the end of the day someones choice of Linux distro is a personal choice so the childish he wasted 8 hours installing Gentoo are, IMHO, uncalled for...what's best? Intel or AMD...Nvidia or ATi...Gnome or KDE...

Gentoo = Good for Linux n00b like me 🙂

 
3 hours for a kernel compile? Did you enable everything in there or something?
On my P3-866 it would take ~10 minutes, slightly more, on my AXP 1.9 GHz it takes a few minutes.
 
Nope, I don't have everything enabled...the machine is ultra slow but then again it is a POS Time badged machine (a work colleague was throwing it out so I grabbed it).

Edit: As of this morning Gnome is still installing 😀
 
I took me nearly 2 days on a 200mmx laptop. Ran out of space when downloading the billlion and a half or so patches for X windows
 
Originally posted by: decode

So you like control. You like compiling from source. But you don't like a system that helps you do that more easily?
Click to expand...

Didn't you see the part where he called portage a great package management system?
 
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