On Sunday 01 January 2006 23:22, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > How slow is too slow for Gentoo? I'm using Gentoo on a 233MHz laptop. > It's not fast, but it's perfectly adequate. Install did take over a > week, I'll admit. > > I'm curious because I seem to do a lot of squeezing the most out of > underpowered computers, and Gentoo has been my friend in these projects. > I would like to know what conditions are not well suited to Gentoo. > > Michael
TBH that's a question of, it can be done in any situation, it's simply how willing you are to adjust to those situations. One of the main factor people consider is time. They want the stuff now and they don't want to wait around for things to compile. However, with that inherent approach comes the lack of flexibility in choosing what you don't need, and what you do. Think of postgres/mysql/sqlite for example. All of these provide database functionality, but chances are you're only going to pick one. If you don't use postgresql support, then why add it into various applications, causing both more space and more memory to load. While that example alone might not seem like a lot, consider the different functionalities portage offers the ability to customize through USE flags. After awhile people start to realize that stuff is loaded faster, not because of suped up CFLAGS, but because the parts they stripped out creates faster load time. Now, binary support for portage exists, but it's not as advertised as the true install method. That's because most senior developers consider Gentoo to have always been a source based distro. Anything to make it binary would consider it to be more like debian or some such. Then ANOTHER argument comes into play by people that have mass server deployments. People that have a cluster of 100 systems with the same specs don't want to sit around and compile for each one. Instead they could have a build server that builds the binary packages for the systems, then the systems do the install. That's basically what it comes down to. Time is the main factor that draws people away. However I personally consider this a side effect, and have no problem letting emerge -u world do its thing overnight. Chris White
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