I did two install for 2 computers after a lot of time using linux.

Talking about time was 240 hours used understanding
and really just was 24 hours compiling from stage 3 in pentiumMMX 163 and 24 24 hours in Celeron 1.6 from stage1. And I am really pleased.

Mi Pentium MMX is really fast with KDE 3.1 and also with Gnome!!!

Now I am going to reinstall using the new CDs, after reading, I mean reading is easy and fast install gentoo, ( ten thousand hard install hasefroch98 ).

And using tbz2 is fastest install KDE, I did it in 1 hour in my Pentium MMX, (is a laptop without LAN card ). In my Celeron was 1 day for KDE and Gnome but was from scratch.

holy cow. i had no idea it could take that long to install a system. pfft i cant be without my computer for more then a few hours. :/

For those of you who would like to have everything compiled from source, but don't like the fact that Gentoo has its own, distributions specific patches, ROCK Linux might really be of interest.

It compiles from unpatched, original sources.
It does so using simple (well, that doesn't mean trivial...) shell scripts, no Python required.
Note, that ROCK wants to be a distribution build kit, instead of a distribution itself. For an easy start you could use dROCK, a desktop distribution built using ROCK.

Info: http://www.rocklinux.org

And there are other source distros, of course: SourceMage, Sorcerer and Lunar Linux.

So Gentoo is definitely by far the most popular among these, but for those of you who really miss a thing in Slackware and don't find Gentoo the perfect solution, there are other, certainly interesting alternatives.

A final word on "dependency hell": Well, there simply *are* dependencies between software packages. RPM, APT and the Gentoo package management system are just trying to support the user in solving this problem. None of them offers a perfect solution, after so many years of development. So maybe the Slackware approach really makes sense: Just accept that there simply is no cure.
If the packages are built by someone clever, dependencies are defined nicely, and a package manager can really be of help. That said, the problem is clear: the dependency definitions in the packages are sometimes not well thought out.

Decide yourself, if you want packagement like in Red Hat or Debian, or not. Personally, I find the Slackware approach better, but sometimes I feel the need for a command like ldd or swaret --dep, and I am glad to have them available on my Slack box.

gargamel

Any benchmarks? (Nice way of saying prove it.)
L8tr
Feend

1 members found this post helpful.

I've already proven it to myself, you will have to run your own tests if you really want find out. Like I said Slackware used to be my baby, but a lack of docs and lots of the code broken always left me wanting something better.
Gentoo solved the doc issue hands down but the broken code is a linux feature that comes with every distro. When the next distro I find out does gentoo it's bye-bye again, they are all just a pit stop in time.

used slack, used gentoo, RH, SuSe, numerous others. I love FreeBSD. I would like a linux distro that is like FreeBSD.

I have tried them. They are not like freeBSD. In the next yar I plan to start working on a distro.

Ok cool! How do I reproduce what you are running on? What level of gento install etc?
Thanx,
Feend

The biggest advantage of gentoo and debian over slackware is the huge library of ebuilds and .deb's that are available. Thousands of packages are available and installable with only a few keystrokes. There are many slackware packages out there but they are not in one place and are far fewer in number. If you can get by on the bog standard "distro on a 1 or 2 CD" type of software selection, this advantage is negated. But, if you need something a bit more obscure, gentoo or debian probably has it.

Packages: http://linuxpackages.net

swaret --update
swaret --install packagename

Debian:
apt-get -update
apt-get -install packagename

Not much of a difference?

C'mon Nigel, you can not even begin to compare the number of packages available on gentoo and debian with linuxpackages. I think even there are more and better packages on Fedora repositories than linuxpackages.

You can't nor should you, really compare the two distributions.

They're different in so many aspects and people either love or loathe them. I found that with gentoo, I didn't have a week where I could afford to let everything build. (The last time I tried it took a while to get X working). Not only that, but the structure of Gentoo is different then slackware.

Package management is different. Install is different.

The gains of compiling your os over installing an already compiled one, don't matter too much. If you really want to get the fastest system, install LFS.

Slackware can be installed and running in less than an hour.

thats what matters to me.

To each his own...

if ( gentoo or slackware )
{
me happy;
}

Download the Minimal install disk (~70MB), boot from that use reiserfs 3.6,
edit "make.conf" to say:

As you can see I optimize for kde. And I won't kid you it's more time and work to do a stage1 (about 18 hours for me on a P4 3.00GHz) but that is how you get speed; now if download the two CD set and do the stage 3 install with the precompiled binaies you will be done in 45 minutes, but it will not be as speedy of a system. I made a *.tar.bz2 backup of my stage1 so a reinstall is about 10 minutes.

I hardly think an 18 hour install is worth a half a nanosecond every now and then.

For the second time in this thread, I have to point out that it is possible to install Gentoo from compiled packages on a CD, and it doesn't take much longer than installing any other distribution. Please read the manual.

--edit---

Although maybe I was a little hasty - this time its not so clear cut and so I should explain, yeah kde des take a long time to install if u want to optimise, but you can install from packages first, then actually use your system. Then you can compile an optimised version overnight while you are asleep, if you like.