[wellylug] Distro Changing...

David Antliff dave.antliff at paradise.net.nz
Thu Dec 25 09:18:06 NZDT 2003


Vincent Cox wrote:
>
> yes, you can do "emerge -p gnome"  for instance and that will give you a
> list of programmes it will download.
> I am still learning about the emerge packaging system but I have read
> that you can set it up so it does all the downloading first then do
> the compiling so you dont have to stay online.

Indeed - see 'emerge -f'. For example, to do a system update over modem
you could do the following and walk away:

  # emerge -DUf world; poff; emerge -DU world

> Speed wise programmes seem to run/start faster though I can't back that
> statement up with any scientific facts only what I have noticed, like
> glxgears run at 80fps where as before on any other distro it would have
> been about 60fps.  Open office starts up ok (that took over 24 hours to
> build).

The performance increase is largely subjective, and as someone said
earlier, not always an increase. But performance isn't the only advantage
of Gentoo. One main philosophy is that you should be free to install
whatever you want in whatever way you prefer - if you want to install
binary packages, then that is possible. If you want to compile from
source, then that's made easy too. People who think Gentoo is simply a
'compile from source' distro don't quite understand where Gentoo is coming
from.

There are binary builds in portage for large packages like openoffice,
which can save considerable time. However if you're going to build
openoffice from source, can I recommend openoffice-ximian - it needs the
Gnome libraries but it's much nicer (anti-aliased fonts for starters).

> >>Documantation at the Gentoo website easy to follow.

Yes, the documentation is excellent compared to many other distributions.
I'd like to recommend the gentoo forums at http://forums.gentoo.org. The
IRC #gentoo chatroom on freenode isn't too bad either, but tends to have a
low SNR at times.

Nobody has mentioned this, but one of the features that makes Gentoo so
good is 'portage', (which is the equivalent of apt-get or rpm) and the
concept of 'USE' flags, which are set by you and allow you to explicitly
define what dependencies you want in your system (if you're compiling from
source).  Don't want any KDE support? Simple, set USE="-kde". Want to use
LDAP support in Evolution? Set USE="ldap". Want to use motif widgets in
emacs? Set "USE=motif". It's very powerful (USE flags basically drive the
dependency tree and configure scripts).

If you're new to Gentoo, you can learn a lot by reading the 'ebuild'
recipes in /usr/portage. These tell portage how to build each package, and
are easily modified or adapted. They provide good insight into how Gentoo
packages work.

Also, there's an effort to port Portage to different distributions too, so
look out for Portage on Redhat, Debian and Cygwin ;)

Cheers,
David.




More information about the wellylug mailing list