Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is GWN dead?

[Qian Qiao <qian.qiao@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:15:49 -0500
David Relson <relson@osagesoftware.com> wrote:
> I used the Gentoo LiveCD when I started with Gentoo in 2006.  Prior
> Linux experience covered 8 or so years with Slackware, RedHat, and
> Mandrake.
> 
> The installation was not smooth.  My recollection is that the GUI
> installer asked for the same information multiple times and there were
> problems installing packages from the CD's.  I ended up with a partial
> install that needed manual fixing.  The process was painful, not
> smooth, but I was able to get Gentoo up and running.
> 
> When I upgraded from 32-bits to 64-bits, I started with the minimal CD
> and did a manual upgrade.  The process worked well though it was time
> consuming (since I used my old world file to ensure I had 64 bit
> versions of everything). 
> 
> By contrast, I've done multiple Mandrake/Mandriva installs, most
> recently about 6 months ago (on an old laptop).  The Mandriva install
> was dead simple and it was up and running within an hour.
> 
> IMHO, for new users to Gentoo having an easy to use installer and a
> current LiveCD (no more than 6 months old) is very important.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> David

IMO, comparing a source distro with a binary distro in terms of installation
time is a bit unfair.

There are a couple of other things you also have to look at:
* Binary distros vendors need to optimize for compatibility. Take i686 as an
example, the same binary might be running on Pentium III, Pentium 4, Athlon and
a series of other hardwares. The advantage is quite obvious, if you ask for
vendor support, they know exactly how the software is compiled, what compiler
flag they used, what patches they applied. The disadvantage is also obvious,
say a particular compiler flag can increase the performance of the software on
your architecture, but breaks compatibility of the binaries with other
architectures, do you think the vendor will have that flag set?
* Source distros, on the contrary, lets you control how you want your software
to be build, what flags to use etc etc, at the price of much much longer
compilation time and much harder for vendors to support you. In someway, you
can even think that source distros lets to you imprint you personality onto your
system, you can go for aggressive -O3, or just optimize size for -Os, you can
- -mfpmath=sse if you know you have the hardware.

Back to the installation CD issue, undoubtably, having a nice working
installation CD for gentoo is desirable, but is it really needed? We are here
to do what we are best at.

LiveCD creators, Knoppix, for example, are good at creating liveCDs and keeping
hardware support on those CDs up-to-date etc etc, we should take advantage of
it.

Gentoo has a huge package repository, I'd much rather see the devs focus on
making that better, cos that's what they are good at.

There's no need to look at different distros with borders and boundaries and
have you mind bound on the concept that "I need to use a gentoo CD to install
gentoo".

All these distros/liveCDs are here to help us get the job done, isn't that what
free software is about? Isn't that what choice is about?

- -- Joe


- -- 
A computer scientist is someone who, when told "go to hell", considers 
the "go to" harmful rather than the destination.

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