Linux or OpenBSD?

[MathFan]

Just be aware that if you choose to compile the entire system yourself, it will take quite a while, relatively speaking with regards to how fast your system is. With an old PIII 450 you would be looking at *days*...

Yeah, I understand that But I'm willing to try it if the results are as good as many claim. If I can get a much faster system with gentoo, I'm happy. I hope the compilation to be a bit faster than several days though (I've got a much faster computer, so hopefully, it won't take more than a day)

[kermit]

Well, I have never timed my Gentoo install - but with my Athlon64 3500+ I would say in the neighbourhood of a day by the time I get everything the way I want it. Might be less, but its hard to say the exact amount of hours as I begin bootstrapping and then go to bed...

[confuted]

You are kidding, right? Several hours?!? I used to spend days and weeks configuring, tweaking and installing things to get all the hardware and os-specific stuff right. And now I've got not only an OS that is configured totally by myself, but also knowledge about the OS itself.

You just can't give up trying after an hour. That's just not in the spirit of linux . Also shows a nasty windoze attitude - "if I can't get it to work from the first try - screw it..."

Yes, I'd say that several hours of running through the procedures that have worked and continue to work with other distributions and the professional edition of SuSE is enough time. It seemed that the personal edition is actually incapable of recognizing more than one NIC; at the time I was trying, I had three installed. Personal lacks several other key features as well; the biggest of these is that it installs no compiler by default. You need to click the right buttons during the install (it's buried deep in sub menus) to install GCC, and if you don't install it at that time, there seems to be no way of getting it later (GCC is only distributed as source). I've spent days/weeks/months configuring my system the way I want it (I'm using SuSE 9.0 Pro for now), but that doesn't mean I didn't want to start with a good framework.

And one more thing: you are (totally) omitting package/source dependencies. What if you are going to compile something from source and you run into a dependency list which is way too long to fit on a page. Then you can't just type "./configure && make && sudo make install", right?

I installed The GIMP 2.0 from source, and its list of dependencies I didn't have went seven layers deep. It was hours before I got to the point where I could actually try compiling GIMP again ... but I didn't need a binary.

Has anyone here done Linuxfromscratch? I've been thinking about it.

[MathFan]

I'm using SuSE 9.0 Pro for now

Yeah, read an article about it in Linux Format. They said that it was a really good distro. It costs money though....

but I didn't need a binary.

You COULD have used rpm-packages for all dependencies, which would have probably made it much less time-consuming

[kermit]

Has anyone here done Linuxfromscratch? I've been thinking about it.

I have not done it, but I have been thinking about it too - apparently it is a really good way to get to know Linux internals better...

[^xor]

gentoo!!!
gentoo rulez... besides the portage there is another heavy wight advantage: gentoo is compiled in your own computer... that makes it work damn fast.... Incredibal... its dam fast.

Please read this before uttering another word about Gentoo. You're only contributing to giving Gentoo the undeserved bad reputation it already has among developers...
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-309752.html
http://www.funroll-loops.org/

[kermit]

Please read this before uttering another word about Gentoo. You're only contributing to giving Gentoo the undeserved bad reputation it already has among developers...
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-309752.html
http://www.funroll-loops.org/

heh - that was good for a laugh - good links