[linux-audio-user] AMD64 question: update

[Mark Knecht]

On 7/12/06, carmen <_ at whats-your.name> wrote:
> > NOTE: It is NOT that the Gentoo install is all that difficult. It just
> > takes a lot of time to build everything.
>
> on a recent cpu you can build xorg in about 25 minutes, including its ancillary libaries. add another 25 for firefox. and a couple for fluxbox. hardly 2 days..

Sure, and I can build fluxbox in about 10 minutes and X is up and running.

What I really mean is to get everything set up and really going will,
in my experience, take at least one full day and probably much more
for folks that are unexperience. I was emerging xine, Gnome-light and
some other big stuff. It takes time. Add to that process that you will
almost certainly build one kernel to boot the machine, then an emerge
world will pull in another one, or at least for an audio guy you'll
want to add the pro-audio overlay and build a -rt kernel, and there is
another hour gone by before you've rebooted and have it going.

I admit that a big part of my 2-day process on my son's conversion was
problems with getting ndiswrapper & wireless support working
correctly. That was about 1/2 right there so subtract that from my
previous numbers.

Anyway, the point is, for Dave anyway, that a binary distro will be up
and running in a couple of hours. Gentoo will take much more time, but
I beleive you save huge amounts of time in the long run with Gentoo so
I'm cool with that.

Hey - no reason for us to argue here. We BOTH like Gentoo!! :)

>
> > first time through. In fact, if you have a junk machine sitting around
> > I would STRONGLY recommend building Gentoo on it, getting it running,
> > and then sending it back to the junk pile
>
> but before that, equery list | xargs quickpkg. so you can use it as a PORTAGE_BINHOST so your next install will take 5 minutes instead of 50 ;)

Sounds like a good trick as long as the old junker isn't too noisy.

>
>
> > After Gentoo is built the big advantage is you never have to
> > 'upgrade'.
>
> actually, you do. it mainly involves replacing a symlink to /etc/make.profile every 3 months, and hoping this doesnt break things badly :) if you are going from eg 2004.3 to 2005.1 (skipping 2005.0), i can guarantee you will probably have issues with your toolchain, eselect, or something..hopefully you dont get glibc/gcc errors that create a catch22 situation wrt building further updates..its happened to me, especially when updating to a multilib setup.

Yeah - I just consider that part of the update process, or even just
maintainance process. It's far easier than doing the fc2->fc3->fc4-fc5
tango...

>
> the main reason i'd recommend gentoo is the proaudio overlay. im fairly sure nobody is even close to that amount of binary coverage on the binary distros..
>

My main reason is that it has been, by far, the most stable distro
I've run. I have 3 machines at my parents house. My dad is 78 (yes,
I'm over 50!) and he's run Gentoo for nearly 3 years now with very few
problems. (Mainly browsers and MythTV) My mom uses Gentoo now after
getting sick of Windows pop ups. My wife loves it. My kid wants
Windows (for Games) but too bad. The only windows boxen I have is in
my studio so he comes in here to play a game once in awhile and I know
he's not defocused in his bedroom playing games.

Gentoo, and indeed all Linux ==== good.

- Mark