[ale] Linux without any of the XUBUNTU, GNOME, KUBUTNU but simple window manager

[Jeff Hubbs]

  On 8/10/10 12:49 PM, Chuck Payne wrote:
> Geentoo is cool, but the liast person I saw do an emerge it took him
> three days. That was on P4 with 1G of memory.
>
> Pup
That's kind of a loaded statement - there are orders of magnitude 
difference between, say, "emerge gzip" (42 seconds start-to-finish on 
8x2GHz x86_64 Xeon, most of it spent in configure) and "emerge -uDe 
world", which simply recompiles everything even if there aren't any 
updates.  If the machine in question were running X w/ KDE or Gnome, it 
might have well been hating life at anything more than MAKEOPTS="-j1" 
and there is a lot more to build if it had been an X machine.  Emerging 
gcc is rather RAM-intensive also so if whatever that guy was doing 
involved building gcc or g++ then it was going to take some time, 
especially if his swap partition was on the same disk as everything else 
and he was also running X.

If the building time involved with new Gentoo instances (which in 
practice tend to be build-once/copy-many/rebuild-at-leisure) or the 
occasional update of big apps isn't something you can absorb by doing 
other work, making phone calls, a trip to the loo, having a moment of 
quiet reflection, etc., then Gentoo's not for you.

Although I will say that if your work does involve emerging and 
unmerging packages as a matter of day-to-day routine, even just a small 
distcc rig and ccache makes a huge difference.  With distcc, parallelism 
seems to matter more than sheer clock speed.  I try to have some x86 and 
x86_64 machines set up at home and at work for distcc purposes.