13 May
2009
13 May
'09
1:39 a.m.
On Saturday 09 May 2009 7:00:08 pm Brent Busby wrote:
Since there's been some discussion recently about
questionable choices
from the distros about the way they build multimedia apps that people
depend on, sometimes building large numbers of packages against problem
libraries that can't just easily be swapped out and corrected, what is
the prevalent opinion about Gentoo? Does anyone here have any comments
about getting actual work done on a Gentoo workstation?
I should say while asking this that I have done source based upgrades of
the base OS and package system on FreeBSD for a long time, so I'm not
unfamiliar with some of the ups and downs of this approach (days of
compiling, packages that never really do quite integrate together,
etc.). But FreeBSD isn't a very good multimedia OS, partially due to
limitations in the kernel, which was made for TCP/IP, not for low
latency.
Should I have my head examined for even thinking of depending on Gentoo
for a DAW workstation (which will also do some video editing and perhaps
gaming on the side)? Or would this be an effective way to avoid all the
distro politics and have my binaries compiled from nearly vanilla
upstream and linked to whatever libraries I darned well want them to be?
I've used Gentoo as the basis for my DAW since 2003. I've built DAWs for
friends based on Gentoo. It can be very frustrating if you don't have at least
a minimal understanding of programming, compiling, and the basics of how linux
works.
Every once in a while I run into an issue with a package here and there, but
Google usually has the answer.
It is a rolling distro, so you are best advised to use one of two approaches:
1 - Get it up and running, and never touch it again.
2 - Set aside time to update it about once every 2 months
Since everybody is listing their compile options...
I use "-O2 -march=native -mfpmath=sse -ftree-vectorize -pipe"
-Reuben