[Sussex] Debian news...

[Paul Graydon]

> Simon Huggins <huggie at earth.li> writes:
> 
> > Presumably he just needs to fiddle the kernel for Ubuntu to 
> recognise 
> > his network card whereas with Gentoo you lose the lovely package 
> > management and have to compile everything from source.
> 
> Er.. no.. you have a different but equally lovely package 
> management system - you do have to spend a lot of time 
> compiling though :-) 

Which is one reason I'll be ditching Gentoo shortly from the box.  It's
a nice little thing, SFF system with an XP-2500M running in it, but if I
have to compile KDE on it one more time I'll scream.  Even having
boosted the ram it still takes a long time to do that compile..
Ultimately its just not worth it.  The benefits are marginal in having a
self-compiled entire system.  Sure, optimised binaries are good and
worth it, but not the whole system compiled on a box.  If I do go back
to Gentoo in the future it'll be to a Stage3 build.  I've done stage1
twice now and feel a good sense of accomplishment, but practicality?  I
almost certainly wouldn't run it in a production environment unless it
was on a huge mainframe linux server with lots of dumb terminals hooked
up to it, or for a good sized database cluster.  For that every ounce of
performance squeezed would probably be worth it, and it'd be
sufficiently parrallelised to speed up the compilation significantly!
One despondant user complained on the Gentoo forums a few months ago
that whe he'd installed it on his couple of hundred processor mainframe
system, it had only been able to use 80 odd CPUs for compiling.  Used
all of them once it was up and running though.  Still, his system was
running X-Windows on a large number of dumb terminals around the place
he worked and needed that power apparently.