Re: [tlug] First impressions of Gentoo

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Josh" == Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> writes:

    Josh> The Gentoo install CD is a hell of a mean rescue disk,
    Josh> though. :)

So is the NetBSD floppy, and in recent times I've needed the
floppy....

    Josh> I am sure you can find FTP downloads somewhere, since you
    Josh> seem to be dead-set against BitTorrent... ;-P

Oh, I'll get around to using Bittorrent eventually, but when you
download an average of one ISO a year, it doesn't seem pressing.  :-)

    Josh> Yeah, you should report that as a bug.

One of these days.

    Josh> As Stoyan and Edward noted, this can easily be fixed with
    Josh> USE flags

You're missing the point: "this" is *user ignorance*, and even if it's
one of those "oh shit I shoulda figgered" cases (yes, I already knew
that links and w3m have image extensions), USE flags still aren't
going to be fix *that*.

    Josh> It is probably correct for Gentoo to default to enabling
    Josh> X-related junk,

Only because the USE flags aren't flexible enough.  (Yes, I read ahead
in the thread.  Pppphhhlbbtbtbtbtt!)  There should be a way to say
"this package is optional until required or explicitly requested".
Hell, even the kernel has a singleuser option built in!

    Josh> Even with the qualifiers, this is praise indeed, coming from
    Josh> you!

Yah, well, a dual-core opteron with both cores running (which NetBSD
didn't do out of the box, and didn't do very well with the stock SMP
kernel) makes things pretty snappy, even at "only" 1.8 GHz, which is
also a rush.  (Heck, it built all of X.org between "Baba O' Riley" and
"Won't Get Fooled Again", which ain't shabby---this is the old vinyl
format.)  I did take advantage of the MAKEOPTS="-j (#CPUs + 1)" advice
early in the installation guide (hardly an appropriate place for it
but in this case I'm not complaining :-).

Now I need to decide how to configure the SATA disks, which presumably
should give a performance boost to disk intensive activities like
emerging (for now I've just installed into a partition on a Ultra133
IDE disk).  We're getting there!

I wonder if Xen will run on this baby ....


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