[wplug] Gentoo is so nice..

[John Strange]

Well..

After working with redhat 9 for a week and working around most of the
problems, all of them in fact I still felt it was not very nice.  Gnome
still felt very very sluggish, apps took a while to start.  In general I
really used to like redhat but their last few releases are really
starting to make me wonder why...

Insert Gentoo Linux: (http://www.gentoo.org)

I had once installed Gentoo for about 6 months, and it was really nice,
so I decided to try again..  Gentoo is what I would consider not a
*VERY* friendly linux choice, but it's VERY fast.

The stage1 install is the ultimate in customization, it compiles
everything on your system from source code.  You can define global
optimizations for your system.  There are multiple stages, 3 to be
exact, each one offering

I chose somewhat agressive optimizations:  -03 -march=pentium3

Now, gentoo is NOT an hour long install, the install is pretty intensive
and can take a while to do.  I would say I spent 12 hours compiling
software, they do apparently have bin packages now, but I chose to
install them through compiling each package.

Now the time it takes to install is a bit much, but the instructions are
rather straightforward with some more difficult parts such as installing
grub by hand, or creating an fstab by hand.  It's something though that
once you do you may understand other things that were hidden by GUI's or
whatever.

After the install and X built and everything that I wanted I was
presented with a system that while running X would do a few following
things:

Start Evolution in 4 seconds
Start Mozilla in 3 seconds
startx in about 8 seconds
gcc 3.2
xfree 4.3
kernel 2.4.20 with nice patches (you can use stock kernels if needed)
/devfs (interesting change)

To say the very least I'm not an owner of a very fast linux system, that
is very nice, and optimized to the point of anal retention! :)  If you
are bored and getting tired of people telling you gnome has to be
sluggish give gentoo a try, you'll be suprised and hooked at the same
time.

- John