[PLUG] Rat off a Sinking Ship?

[alan]

On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Jeme A Brelin wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Preston Crawford wrote:
> > On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, alan wrote:
> > > At this point I would add gentoo there as well.  (Though it depends on the
> > > userbase involved...)
> > 
> > Also depends on whether you want to wait weeks to have a usable
> > system. Not sure a couple weeks of lost productivity is worth the
> > nanoseconds of time you save because your apps run a hair faster.
> 
> This is just plain FUD.
> 
> Gentoo has automation scripts and utilities and a patched, complete single
> source tree.  So it's probably MUCH faster to install than building a
> system from scratch by hand and that doesn't even take three days on
> something better than a Celeron 300.

Depends on how much you want.  If you want KDE and/or Gnome, it will take 
you a long time.  Took about two weeks to get everything I wanted built.  

It was also on a laptop with next to no drive cache only 128 megs of 
memory.

> I can build a working system from source (with X) in a day.
> 
> As an experiment, I built a server from scratch on a P60 and THAT only
> took two days.  (The glibc compile alone was about 8 hours.)  I'm still
> using that system for DNS and a mailman installation.

It all depends on what you want.  "Usable" depends on what you want to do.  
If you want to use X and have a bunch of apps it is going to take 
substantially longer that just building a basic mail server.

I like Gentoo.  It just takes a long time to install on slow hardware.  
(At least for what I want to do.)