From Source Distros?

[Mark O. Kimball]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 08:07:55 -0800 (PST)
JJ Neff <jjneff at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm playing a lot with this sun box (ultra10).  I ve had Solaris 7,8,9
> on it.  Debian and now I'm installing gentoo.
> 
> Installing gentoo makes me wonder, what is the true value in installing
> a "from source" distro.  I have been working on it for days and still
> dont have a running system.  It takes 3-4 days to get to a desktop like
> environment (KDE,GNOME etc) 
> 
> Debian takes me about one-3 hours total if I have a fast Internet
> connection or cds only.  - I tried LFS a few times but always ran out
> of time.  
> 
> So other than the ever heard "perfectly optimized OS" which I don't
> know if I believe since who knows ALL the optimization options of every
> piece of software.  Please lets discuss the pros and cons (not a fight
> but a discussion please:-)
> 
> I know others here use Slackware and some gentoo so what am I gaining
> by having every last file compiled fom source?

I will preface all this with the fact I run Gentoo on my laptop, my
desktop, my SUN workstation, and some other SUN workstations I help
administer. I have used RedHat and Slackware for the x86 platform and
Aurora (based on RedHat 7.3), Solaris, and briefly NetBSD for the SPARC
platform. I am, however, not particularly distribution biased.

If you look beneath the surface, Gentoo isn't really about a highly tuned
system.  As you have stated, the "perfectly optimized OS" is a difficult
proposition at best. In fact, what appears to be very good optimizations
can sometimes lead to really poor performance. I build everything with
very conservative optimizations. So far, so good! 

Where Gentoo shines (especially on the SPARC arch) is the available
software is current.  For instance, I can run OpenOffice on my SPARCs.  I
don't believe there is another Linux distro (for the SPARC arch) with
this option. For this, you pay the price of either compiling source code
yourself or finding someone who has already done it for you.  There are
GRP ("Gentoo Reference Platform") packages which are pre-compiled
packages for a given platform.  I have not looked to see what is
available for the SPARC arch since I don't mind the compiling. What I do
is compile on one machine then distribute that package to the others. 

Another strength of Gentoo seems to be its community. Their forums are
full of very useful solutions to problems. Of course, like any public
forum, you need judge what is useful and what is not. 

Once again, I am not putting down any other distribution (actually there
are some I found quite horrible but I will not discuss that here). I am
however sharing my experience with Gentoo.

Marko
-- 
Mark O. Kimball
Gasparinilab, University at Buffalo  |  Low temp physics
mok2 at physics.buffalo.edu  |  URL: enthalpy.physics.buffalo.edu
lab phone: 716-645-2017x122  Fax: 716-645-2507