Ravings on CS, OSs, PLs, SF, and other things geeky...
Following my recent motherboard upgrade, I decided it was time to try something new. My idea was to try out Gentoo as my full time personal work environment distro and see how it goes. My main objectives in this was mostly twofold:
To gain a deeper understanding of the Linux kernel and the various sub systems used in modern distributions.
To save my self the twice annual upgrade cycles of the distributions I have been using so far, mainly Fedora and Ubuntu.
In particular I find the upgrade cycle to be annoying since most of the time I have spent quite some time fine tuning my setup, and when a new release is made I find I only want to upgrade for a few select programs (the latest version of Firefox etc) and when it’s done I always have to go and fix various incompatibilities between upgrades, which can take up quite some time. Also installing newer version of heavily dependent software when they are not in the provided packaging system can be an all too time consuming task. With a source based distribution I figured I could set my system up how I liked it and then only upgrade select programs or add new features when I so desired. While I do find having to compile all off the software to be a bit of chore, taking days if not weeks setting up the system right as opposed to a few hours with Fedora or even less with Ubuntu (especially if you use Automatix to install the various restricted software), my hope is that it will give me a more stable system in the long term.
With these goals in mind I went to business. Like I mentioned in an earlier post the official Gentoo installation software didn’t want to recognize my ethernet card so I used my Fedora installation to download the Gentoo 3rd stage tarballs, set up a new partition for Gentoo, and in a chrooted environment made all the preparation. Compared to my last Gentoo installation about two years earlier when I was still relatively new to Linux things proceeded pretty smoothly. I got all the necessary feature compiled into my kernel in the first go. Here the main thing was to review all the hardware specs from lshw and find the corresponding cpu, graphic, chipset and bus modules. Traditionally I have been using KDE on my desktop machine and deciding to keep it thus I went for the basic installation. This base only includes core KDE functionality and all other programs have to be added separately. This was pretty nifty as most KDE installations include by default a bunch of applications I never use.
When all was said and done I have to say that the speed difference really surprised me. This Gentoo AMD64 compilation felt significantly faster and more responsive than Fedora 8 for AMD64. Windows would pop up in an instant and programs were quick to start. Since all modules were compiled into the kernel booting time was also a bit faster.
Since this exercise I have grown more satisfied with Gentoo every day. Even installing it on an older i386 machine replacing Ubuntu 6.06 and finding it running quite smoothly with even newer software. While the speed difference was not as dramatic as the difference between source and binary distros for the AMD64 it did feel a bit friskier if only slightly so. My satisfaction was again reaffirmed after I spent about an hour trying to install the latest libgpod on Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu , a trivial task in Gentoo, only to deem it more trouble than it was worth. My sister will have to go without iPod Classic/Nano3 support for now…
I hope to stick with Gentoo for the time being and although the Gentoo community seems awfully quiet of late I hope it will stay strong. Next up… my laptop!
