Gentoo Install Time
 

Well, today I got bored and decided to wipe my sage 3 install and go for a stage 1. Well, from what I read I was expecting it to take at least an entire day. Well, low and behold, 9 hours later Its fully installed with xorg and fluxbox as well as qt and gtk.

Can someone explain to me why it was so much faster than any other times I have seen? (To top it off this was done on my dell 600m)

I had the same times. I got the base install done (kernel, grub...basically to the end of the handbook) in 6 hours and xorg, fluxbox, gtk and others a few hours later. I was also a bit surprised at how fast I got through with it compared to the 30 hour horror stories I've been reading about, but everything installed just fine. I think using flux rather than gnome or kde is a big part of it, but maybe by 30 hours they mean getting everything set up just the way they like it, with all the configs, themes and such.
I have a p4 2.0, 512mb ram, 80gig 8m buffer hdd, and a speedy cable connection.

it's just all down to CPU power... gotta crunch that code. also depends if you compile mozilla, kde etc... they can takes hours on their own.

probably because you didnt install Office, or Firefox from source. (and to a lesser extent KDE)

on my 1.3Ghz system...

Kdelibs + Kdebase + kdenetwork + kdeutils + kdeadmin + kdegraphics + kdeartwork takes 7 hours
firefox takes 10 hours
openOffice takes 12 hours.

however thankfully OpenOffice and Firefox can be install from pre-compiled binary's :D

Well, I installed firefox from source and openoffice from binary and it took and hour tops.

firefox from source !!!!
are you sure !?

install times other have posted are almost half-days !

yah, last time I use gentoo.. firefox was a prebuilt ebuild. The ebuild was just there so you can emerge firefox and skip the hassle of downloading and installing it.

eh ? yeah ur confused... (or i am)
there are 2 ebuilds. firefox, and firefox-bin.

firefox-bin is a precompiled version which is simply downloaded, and extracted using emerge.

but if you emerge firefox, then gentoo downloads the source code to firefox and compile it.

i believe that firefox-bin could be downloaded and installed within the hour (for a slow internet connection)
but even on a lightning processor, compiling firefox will take a few hours.

wow, how do you guys put up with such long times to install.. I wouldnt have the patience, and my PC is noisy for overnight, lol :p

how much faster is gentoo than another, say Ubuntu (which I find to be so much faster than say, my XP installation :tisk: yes, I dont use XP much anymore Ubuntu is so nice :) )

is it worth the huge install time?

I have an ISO of it, booted it once.. it looked very, very scary and I didnt know what to do and I never used it lol :newbie:

Gentoo is not for newbs.
the thing about gentoo, is where other distro's are optimised best for overall performance or pentium / amd porcessors, Gentoo can be optimised for your exact CPU.

also the Gentoo kernel, well, there are several of them, each optimised for different users, (most pick gentoo-dev-sources optimised for desktop machines)

also use flags allow you to only link programs againsed library you want.

so gentoo is harder to setup.. and gentoo is only as fast as you make it.

if you do it right, gentoo is lightning fast. if you do it wrong, gentoo is slow as fsck !

for example i used gentoo to guild an abolute minimal system.. it was just a file / print server, nothing else... it booted in 6 seconds... cummon !

Hey whats the difference between installing via the LiveCD and stage 3 tarball? And which is faster?

too long........one can install Slackware AND compile a LFS system in the
time it takes to install Gentoo.............

I sure hope that was sarcasm. If you can get a LFS system up and running before a gentoo system, then you sir are good.

ive seen scripts laying around that do the whole LFS book for you....
this would be faster than gentoo, since the gentoo's emerge system leaves you with a much more fuunctional minimal install than LFS.

hehe... does not using scripts defeat the purpose of doing an LFS install in the first place?