[wellylug] Gentoo vs. Debian resources

[Bret Comstock Waldow]

Hi,

Unless this turns into a job, I will want to re-use the Debian
installation drive as my backup by the weekend, so please let me know
commands you would like run before then.  I have to physically swap
disks to do this, and would like to minimize that - I'd hate to damage
my tablet.

The two disks are identical Fujitsu 500G SATA drives with one usually in
an external USB2 case.  My backup scheme is 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
bs=4096k'.  Five minutes with a screwdriver and I'm back in business
(although it takes 5 hours to make a copy with these size drives).  And
I can experiment with a different install without messing with my
working system.

Machine is a Fujitsu ST5112 slate tablet.  Core2Duo 1.33Ghz, 4G RAM, but
with a pestiferous 32 bit Intel chipset that only allows access to 3.25G
of the RAM (curses).

My criteria is just to get enough going that I can do what I want - I
may never know what comes along with that, and only care if it stops me
from getting something else.  I run:
Thunderbird (or IceDove on Debian)
FireFox (or IceWeasel on Debian, with a local recompile of the Google
GWT extension for development)
Sun Virtual Box proprietary 3.12 with a 128Mbyte Windows XP session
a terminal with two sessions
XFCE Task Manager
my own Stylus/Handwriting Input Panel using Sun Java 6 JVM
Wicd
XFCE applets - roughly the same, but the sensors work better on Gentoo
XFCE power management on Gentoo, Gnome-power-manager on Debian
FJbtndrv compiled on each (Fujitsu controls and screen rotation - two
daemons)

Suspend and Hibernate work.


wellylug-request at lists.wellylug.org.nz wrote:

> Subject:
> Re: [wellylug] Load averages - Gentoo v. Debian
> From:
> Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net>
> Date:
> Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:21:50 +1100

> Bret Comstock Waldow <bcw1000 at yahoo.com> writes:
>> I'm working through the best set up for my laptop/tablet.  Given various
>> requirements, I've implemented the same desktop in Gentoo and Debian
Lenny.

>
> Wow.  Those are some amazing differences!  I would love to know more;
we use
> Debian here at work, and it is always nice to get a bit more
performance back,
> so...
>
> Can you tell me which services are run by Debian out-of-the-box that Gentoo
> doesn't?  Just the process names would be fine. ;)

Would 'ps -ef' on both machines do?  Or...?

> I am also curious about the memory: I presume you mean 300-500MB extra
cache,
> not unused, memory; if it isn't obvious from the list of daemons, can you
> identify what uses that?  Even the results from top in memory sort
should be
> good enough to start from.

Looks like 'unused memory' to me.  Am I misreading this?

Gentoo:

bret at aphrodite:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3284       1469       1815          0         27        684
-/+ buffers/cache:        757       2526
Swap:         6400          0       6400

CPU% hovers in the lows teens, with occasional spikes up to 50%.


Debian:

aphrodite:/home/bret# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3288       1715       1573          0          6        544
-/+ buffers/cache:       1163       2124
Swap:         2588          0       2587

Unscientific observation of the CPU load says 35+%, ranging from 25% to
50+% over several minutes.


> What compilation options are you using for that Firefox image?

Firefox specific:
bret at aphrodite:~$ grep ire /etc/portage/package.use
www-client/mozilla-firefox    mozdevelop restrict-javascript sqlite
en_GB en_US es es_ES es_MX

('restrict-javascript' installs No-Script by default.  I add that to
Debian, too.)

My global '/etc/make.conf' file:
## for Fujitsu ST5112 Tablet Computer
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=core2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

# WARNING: Changing your CHOST is not something that should be done lightly.
# Please consult http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml before
changing.
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"

GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/Gentoo
http://ftp.swin.edu.au/ge$

SYNC="rsync://rsync.au.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"

MAKEOPTS="-j3"

USE="alsa acpi consolekit jpeg jpeg2k policykit dbus hal gtk gtk2 nptl \
thunar sound libnotify dhcpcd java samba networkmanager svg cleartype \
X smp mmx sse sse2 ssse3 hddtemp lm_sensors fortune sqlite python ncurses \
aalib dirac encode faac faad ffmpeg mp3 speex theora v4l v4l2 vorbis \
x264 ogg xv opengl ieee1394 schroedinger \
startup-notification replytolist mozdevelop mozdom \
odbc spell subversion fftw pdf tcl tk unicode cairo \
cdparanoia md5sum png pnm win32codecs cddb flac mpeg \
cups laptop gnome-keyring javascript truetype tiff nsplugin dvi"

FEATURES="ccache"

LINGUAS="en en_US en_GB"
VIDEO_CARDS="intel opengl"
INPUT_DEVICES="evdev keyboard mouse wacom"
ALSA_CARDS="usb-audio hda-intel"

PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="save"
PORTAGE_ELOG_CLASSES="warn error info log qa"
ACCEPT_LICENSE="skype-eula PUEL dlj-1.1 sun-bcla-java-vm"

Cheers,
Bret