I know, I'm not the first, but I'm just wondering what benefits there would be. I'm hearing rumors that future versions of Slack won't have Gnome, which scares me, since Dropline isn't the best implimentation I've seen of Gnome for a distribution.
So, for Gentoo, I'm thinking of pulling down my 200mhz so I can read the instructions while I install Gentoo (Stage 1) on my 1.7ghz Pentium 4. How different is Gentoo from Slack? Performance wise? configurability-wise? File-location-wise?

How long would you guys expect it to take to compile everything for a Stage1 on a P4 1.7ghz? I'm sure that this would probably be the best time to have an AMD 64, but unfortunately I don't, so I'm just going to make due with what I have. I'm also not sure if I should reorganize my partition layout. Right now I have a 40GB hard drive that Linux is on, with about 500MB or so being swap space, possibly 1GB, I forget how much it is, then 6.5GB for /, and 31GB for /home, which also has /usr/local/ piggy-backing on it (again, not too clever or creative, but I'd rather have them both on one partition than on separate, so I don't have to worry about a loss of usable and practical disk space.)

Didn't want to knock you off the 0 Replies list on the LQ home page, but
since you're not there now, have you read this? I did and there are some
folks in that thread who have some really good information, especially what
bughead1 said in post #12. Not trying to persuade you one way or another,
for Linux is all about choices. Just think this is a good read...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=225661

first off...... dont bother with that other old machine...
download a live distro like DamnSmallLinux (50 meg) or Knoppix (700 meg)

you can install Gentoo while booted Knoppix or DSL, then you have a full desktop with webbroswers and all to read the instructions.
anyways.. definatly do it ! i was a slacker... but gentoo blew me away !

here's how long it took me to compile my distro..
stage1 -> stage2 about 2 hours
stage2 -> stage3 about 6 hours
Xorg 3 hours
Qt + KdeLibs + Kdebase + Kdenetwork + kdeartwork = 9 hours
Firefox = 9 hours
OpenOffice =12 hours.
kernel = 20 mins

luckily though, you can install things like firefox and onenoffice the binary way.

so yes.. it will take a day or so to compile.

but porvided you set your optimisation flags right, you get a lightning fast system.

plus the package manager "emerge" is the best package manager around..

Gentoo is bleeding edge, fast, just as customisable as linux from scratch...

believe all the hype, gentoo rocks !

Gentoo has many advantages over Slackware:

Speed:

In Gentoo you can compile the entire system with the C/C++ flags you choose. As all binaries are then optimized to your architecture (p4), your system is (at least in theory - whether you can feel it, is another topic to discuss) as fast as it can be. You can also prelink your system quite easily which makes everything load faster, especially KDE if you set it to "know" that your system is prelinked. Gentoo also boots a bit faster than Slackware, especially if you don't use hotplug and manually select the modules you want to load. And the boot up init scripts look much nicer than in Slackware - everything is color coded etc Installing Gentoo is a pain though, especially after being used to good installers like in Slackware/Debian. Luckily you only have to do it once, but it's still quite awful.

Easier to customize:

With USE flags you can specify what you want your your binaries. For example, I doubt you'll find a binary distro which ships KDE without arts (arts has always caused me trouble). In Gentoo, you can emerge kde with the -arts use flag and you'll get a KDE without the annoying sound system. Another example would be a glibc with NPTL support. Slackware is also very difficult to install if you want to customize the instalation. In Gentoo you start with a very minimal base system and only get the packages that you need. Thanks to the dependency solving package manager one won't have any problems - it would be very difficult to do that in Slackware since you have to track the dependencies yourself.

Package management:

Portage is a very powerful package manager. You can use binaries and source (although don't expect anything great concerning binaries... the amount of precompiled packages is very modest). As Gentoo is a source distribution, you build all the binaries yourself. It will take time, but you only have to do it once. Portage also tracks dependencies automatically, so you only have to worry about which programs you want and portage will take care of the rest. The package selection is absolutely awesome, by far the best in any distribution if you want a huge amount of modern software. Debian also has a nice amount, but Gentoos selection is much more modern. For example: xorg 6.8, kde 3.3.1, fluxox 0.9.10, firefox 0.10PR can all be found in portage. Package selection is the reason why I switched to Gentoo.

Community and documentation:

Slackware has a good and big community too, but the documentation available doesn't even come close to Gentoo. Take a look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml. Gentoo has, imo, by far the best documentation available for any distribution. Gentoo also has one of the biggest linux-themed forums where you can find help. I've managed to solve all my problems so far by just searching the official Gentoo forum.

Slackware is a good distribution too but its package management is something I couldn't use after getting used to apt/portage, and it's hard to get used to the amount of official packages after seeing Debian/Gentoo.

Oh and about configuration, it's alot like in Slackware. X is configured with xorgconfig etc, but Gentoo has some if its own config files like rc.conf etc. Everything is very well documentated and commented though. I especially like the runlevel system which is very clear and easy to use.

In the end it's all a question of opinion though, try it and see if you like it. It's a good thing that there are many different distributions. Choice is always good.

- another happy Gentoo user signing out

i prelinked my system and noticed little improvement.

how do you set kde to know that the sytem is prelinked ?
what do you mean ?

"Speeding Up KDE After Prelinking

KDE's loading time can be greatly reduced after prelinking. If you inform KDE that it has been prelinked it will disable the loading of kdeinit (as it isn't required anymore) which speeds up KDE even more.

Set KDE_IS_PRELINKED="true" in /etc/env.d/99kde-env to inform KDE about the prelinking. " (pasted from http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml)

If you don´t set that, KDE doesn´t know it is prelinked and will still use kdeinit to find things etc. Once you´ve set that, check your processes (you need to restart KDE first of course). Kdeinit should no longer be before every KDE process and applications should start clearly faster.

In my opinion, the learning curve for Gentoo is steep but going from Slackware to Gentoo would be less steeper then going from something like Fedora to Gentoo.

I've never been I die hard Slacker but I have had it installed for a while. The biggest difference I see between the distros is the package management. You just can't beat portage's functionality.

In terms of what stage to use its an age old debate really(well as old as Gentoo is actually). If its your first install I'd suggest doing a stage 3 install. It will get a Gentoo system up and running much faster so you can see whats going on. Also realize that within a couple of months their will most likely be an update to the majority of packages you installed from stage3 so you can recompile them yourself and you will basically have a stage 2 install.

Finally, the gentoo community is outstanding. I mean the best out there in my opinion. I tried Debian and asking a noob Debian question on their forums resulted in some serious RTFM and whatnot. Gentoo's forums are amazing and you can find an answer to pretty much any question you have without the rude "Your an idiot noob reply".

Give it a shot. If you don't like it you can always go back to slack and don't forget linuxquestions.org is here for you!

Not to insult or anything, but your times are prettymuch worthless if you don't say what kind of specs your system has. For all I know, it could be a 700mhz P3.

Oh, and the reason why I would use the 200mhz computer would be just to read documentation, it already has Slack on it, and that's all it will ever have on it. If I ever tried to put Gentoo on it, I think it would die before I finished stage 2.

I'm aware that Gentoo is more of a hobbiest distro, which is also why I'm looking into it. I guess just 2 things are concerning me right now:
1) Does it now come with the 2.6.9 kernel?
2) Does it come natively with Grub? I've had problems with Grub on this computer, and I think it's because Windows is on /dev/hda2, not /dev/hda1, because Dell decided to install their "helpful" registration setup crap on /dev/hda1, and for some odd reason my family still wants that on there. Also, my Linux partitions are all on /dev/hde, which is connected via PCI - IDE bridge. I can get LILO to work fine, but only if I boot off of a CD and then run it (I can mount the partitions and everything like if it were a recovery from a bad bootloader install, just can't have it boot off of the hard drive, not sure why, might be because of my FC2 install that screwed up my hda and hdb, who knows.) A key thing is that I have to be able to boot Windows XP from /dev/hda2 while installing Grub on /dev/hde's MBR, I guess. If not, then I guess I'll just have to stick with boot disks for Gentoo....

1. If you want the 2.6.9 kernel yes. If you want 2.6.10 then you can install mm-sources. Its all about choices.
2. Natively? It comes with whatever you want to install. If grub is your thing then emerge grub. If lilo is your thing then emerge lilo. Its all about choices.

What is a hobbiest distro? I don't collect Gentoo. I don't work on it once in a while. I've used it for years now. Its no fad. It is my distro of choice.

Well, the install is in the process. Right now I'm using my 200mhz computer as the manual, as well as for writing this up, because I can't justify printing off 102 pages for the install. Right now I'm performing the emereg --sync, and it's taking a while, but hopefully I'll the kernel installed and LILO as well pretty soon. I changed my partition scheme so now I have a 56MB /boot partition, a 15GB / partition, ~24GB /home, and a 1GB swap (swap located on the last 1000GB of the disk, so hopefully it has faster read/write speeds than where it was previously, on the inside grooves of the disk. Wish me luck!

oops.. i was planning on saying what hardware i had..
AMD athlon 1.33 mhz, 512 meg ram.

the kernel source for gentoo is insane.
unless you specify otherwise, portage will always emerge the latest stable versiob of everything.

as for the kernel, you have choses of
Gentoo kernel (2.4 or 2.6) which is an optimised version of the plain linux kernel
Gentoo server kernel (2.4 or 2.6), optimised for servers.
Gentoo hardened kernel (2.4 or 2.6) optimised for security like SELinux.
Vanilla Kernel 2.4 or 2.6 which is just a plain unmodified kernel straight from kernel.org

and many others with different speed tweaks.
there's even a usermode kernel that lets you run a kernel within a kernel within a kernel (for testing)

thats whats great about gentoo... its allways bleeding endge new, and when you want to update, its just a single command "emerge -U world"

Well, I like the install so far. I never expected that it would be painless, nothing with computers ever is. Portage had trouble finding good servers, so I had to manually enter the servers in my /etc/make.conf file after doing the serverlist or listservers or whichever command. So right now I'm somewhere between a stage 2 and a stage 3, I issued an "emerge --fetchonly system" command, then had to manually get the files Portage couldn't find (about 5 of them), and then I issued "emerge system"
I just hope the family is willing to wait however long it will take to emerge everything up to the kernel and the bootloader. After that, I'll call it a day (if the day hasn't passed) and pick up on part 2 tomorrow. As for optimizations, I did march i686, O3, and pipes

you probably would have been better optimising for your porcessor, i686 is a very wide range... even pentium 1's are in the i686 family.

march=athlon-xp or march=athlon-tbird, or march=pentium-whatever
but nevermind.

portage coundnt get some files ?
i had that porblem once, but i think it was just the server.

its annoying, but when compiling the system, try to have 2 different emerge instances running.
one downloading, and one compiling.

emerge is un-efficiant in the way it downloades, then compiles, then downloads again.
especially on slow internet connections.

i find the compile runs much faster if i have emerge --fetchonly (whatever) running in the background, then 5 minutes after the first few downloads have completed, start a compiling thread.

that way the system is downloading and compiling at the same time.

Oh damn, I guess I'll just have it set to march=pentium-4 after I finish compiling my kernel modules. The family conveniently turned off the computer when I was out of the house last night, but fortunately the log for emerge says it exited successfully, so hopefully there wasn't any corruption.

The problems portage has for me is that it tries to use servers that don't exist, or they just don't have the files, and it takes forever for it to timeout, so I can get the files it doesn't find much quicker if I just go to a mirror that has the files, then have portage resume after I download it.

strange...when installing, the step where portage looks for a good local mirror didnt work too well, so i just left it with no server entry in the make.conf.

so its just using the default, which is working fine for me, maybe you should try that ?
ive never had any trouble with my portage server (except once it seemed to go down for 5 minutes)