Howdy.

I've done several installs of Linux on various distro's and many of them with KDE. I've never ever seen it take THAT long to install, but on Gentoo it's (according to several forums pointed-to by Google) a multi-day process to do an install of Gentoo.

So I'm wondering why it takes so long as opposed to other distributions?

Thank you for your time.

Gentoo compiles packages for your specific hardware at the time of install. Apart from the base (level 3?) install, everything else is downloaded, and compiled from scratch. The up side is that once installed Gentoo is pretty fast since everything is optimized for you specific hardware.

KDE does take a while to compile. I've done it before for slackware, it didn't take all day but it came pretty close.

Ok, so I'm not just waiting because I'm using Portage, but because the way Gentoo implements its installer, everything is customized for my hardware, and any other distribution, if doing the same optimization, would take roughly as long as Gentoo.

Thank you.

As gattaca points out Gentoo is about making custom made. Sometimes it takes more than a smile to do so. Gentoo is no exception to the rule. You have to have everything running smoothly. Its taken me about a year to master it. Not everyone gets the best results, YMMV is a rule when comes to Gentoo.

Personally having an ultra tweaked config. Not including every piece of dependency out there... Ive clocked the compilation of KDE at 697 minutes... according to my logs. This is on a couple years old Celeron 1.8Ghz box with 512DDR and a pretty much standard IDE disk on an aging i845GV GigaByte mobo.

Funny thing is on my experiments Ive found one thing to notice... temperature. No, really. It makes a difference. It can be small... it can be huge.

Example: compile kdelibs. On a hot july day of 36C inside the house. Closed box. Leave it alone and wait... 1 hour and 52 minutes - Same day, open box with a small ventilator blowing wind in the general direction of the mobo... 1 31 minutes.
On a mildly cold december day of 9C inside the house. Closed box. Leave it alone and wait... 1 hour and 17 minutes.
Ona smiliar nonKDE related experiment it once took me 20 hours to compile OpenOffice on a hot day... shift to cold temperatures and it only took 12h30m - Moohoohaha

So... Einstein was right... its all relative. Experiences vary.

One thing is true: Gentoo rules!!!

I love Gentoo on my desktop. That being said, my other machines run ubuntu because they don't have the power or time to compile all that software. It's a classic case of the right tool for the job.

When I install Gentoo, I usually install Xorg and GNOME first. Then I test the installation. Next if everything is good, I install KDE. KDE takes a lot longer than Xorg and GNOME combined. I recommend a top of the line power supply, very good CPU heatsink, and ECC memory, so Gentoo compiles the programs and libraries correctly to minimize crashes during normal use. ECC memory does not cost much. I have seen ECC memory costing 10 to 20 US dollars more than non-ECC memory. I usually install Gentoo in VMware first and then bring the installation to my systems. This makes it easier because VMware can pause a virtual machine. I do not run VMware in Windows. VMware is running under a Gentoo setup.

An 89 degree F or about 36 degree C in a room is way too hot for anybody to function. I suggest buying an air conditioner and set it to at least 80 degree F or about 27 degree C. Computers are designed to work in room temperature that is about 79 degree F or about 26 degree C. Intake fans do not work well over 80 degree F or about 26 degree C. Intake fans do not do their job at 90 degree F or about 36 degree C because at this temperature there is no way to cool off the components.

Dah that temperature effects computer performance. People say 140 degree F or 60 degree C is ok for a computer to run. At this temperature the processor is adjusting (lowering) its clock to work at this temperature, but the processor takes longer from an increase in errors. Sooner or later, the computer crashes, powers down, or reboots. Some systems are set to alarm at a certain temperature threshold.

I prefer using Gentoo as my Linux distribution because its config files are easy to work with and the config files are organized in correct directories. Also the emerge utility makes installing programs very easy and I think compile programs is the only way to use Linux. I recommend Gentoo to everybody, but people are way too impatient. The impatient users do not know what they are missing.

BTW, Gentoo is not fast people have said. My computers are already fast in hardware (no overclocking), so software can only increase the speed marginally or not all.

I prefer Gentoo for its customizability, community, and the portage system. I have no illusions about gentoo's "ricer" image. http://funroll-loops.org/ if you're not familiar with what I mean.

I'm on my... second or third day of compiling KDE now.. I'm curious - on a newish computer (say 2 ghz/512 ram) how long does an "emerge kde" take, from a clean install of gentoo from the minimal cd?

And as a followup question, is there a faster way to do it than that?

The waiting isn't going to kill me, but I'd like to know if there's a faster way to get things up and running.

I was able to emerge KDE on a computer at work in approximately 6 hours (didn't sit there and watch it so it could have finished earlier, it probably did).

The workstation I was using was a Pentium 4 3Ghz with 2GB of ram.

HTH.

Was that a raw "emerge kde" with none of the dependecies previously installed?

I don't think it was a raw emerge. X11 was installed already from a previous failed attempt to compile iceWM.

Alright, thanks again @ everyone.

If you want GUI as fast as you can, first install Gnome. While using the computer, install KDE. I suggest do not use the USE flag kdeenablefinal because it will be bloated more than it is originally though you can play around with gcc options to make KDE use less memory.

If I install Gentoo (Xorg, Gnome, and KDE) on a desktop, it takes about 17 hours on a Pentium 4 2 GHz (Northwood core) with 512 MB of RAMBUS ECC memory. KDE is the least used desktop/window manager in my system, but programs require it. I mainly used GTK based programs.

You can speed up the process with dictcc but the systems joining with dictcc have to have the same gcc compiler and the same programs. If you do not have many systems that have the same setup, compiling in memory is faster than compiling from hard drives. The size have to be a minimum of 2 GB. I suggest 3 GB of memory or more to compile programs with out any space problems. This provides enough memory for the host to do its stuff. I strongly recommend ECC memory when compiling programs in memory or tempfs.