[plug] Debian .vs. Gentoo (long!)

[Cameron Patrick]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 04:51:05PM +0800, Weirdo wrote:
| I don't want to start a flame war, I am looking for advice.

Heh, anyone else reminded of those email viruses that started "I send
you this mail to have your advice"...?

I'm currently a Debian user; I used Gentoo for a brief period of time
before that.  

| I dislike the fact that it is optimised for a 386 and above.

Hmm.  For the most part, I don't think that merely compiling a
distribution for more recent CPUs will give an appreciable performance
gain (with possible exceptions for things like glibc, the kernel and
XFree).  Presumably you've heard about the linmagau comparison earlier
this year...

| I dislike the fact that it is out of date by nearly a year. (I burnt the 7 
| cd set when it came out)

Running Debian "unstable" will get you more recent software.  Waiting
'til December will, according to aj's (admittedly rather optimistic)
plan, get you Debian sarge.

| I am wondering what its package management system is like. i.e. can i just 
| get any src tar ball and start compiling? Will it resolve dependences 
| easily?

emerge resolves dependencies a la apt-get.  Last time I used gentoo, it
/didn't/ check dependencies when you uninstalled a package - i.e.
'emerge unmerge xfree86' wouldn't complain if you had KDE installed,
ferinstance.

Gentoo's package manager normally downloads a package, compiles it,
installs it, then moves onto the next package.  Debian, on the other
hand, will fetch all of the packages at the start and then install them.
Ideally, for a source-based distro, you'd want to see the compilation
and downloading happening simultaneously; last time I looked at doing
this under Gentoo, you could end up with corrupted source packages.

| Also I am on a limited Internet connection (till I get more work) so I 
| can't really on it for packages. What packages are available on the cds?

For Gentoo?  None AFAIK.  You just get enough binaries on the CD to have
a bootable system with a C compiler, and then it fetches everything else
from the internet and compiles it.  I believe that there is no WAIX
mirror for Gentoo distfiles, either.

| If their is a Debian package on one of the Debian disks how hard is it
| to convert (binary) and install on Gentoo?

Assuming that all of the dependencies are okay you should be able to
extract the binary and run it.  You don't get any package management or
anything, and there is a reasonable chance that a given Debian binary
Just Won't Work on a Gentoo system.

| I really am looking for advice to choosing between Debian and Gentoo on a 
| 686 on a limited Internet connection.

When you say "686" do you mean Cyrix "6x86", Intel Pentium Pro (aka
"P6"), or a more recent Intel/AMD chip supporting some superset of the
PPro instructions?  If it's either of the former two, compiling packages
will for Gentoo be incredibly painful - it was bad enough on an 800MHz
Duron.  i.e. if you have a <500MHz CPU, don't even think about using
Gentoo - ideally you'd probably want 1.5GHz+ to get reasonable compile
times; even then, things like XFree/KDE/Openoffice are likely to be
overnighters.

A limited Internet connection (presumably 56k?) is also likely to be a
problem for either Gentoo /or/ Debian unstable.

| It needs to be poweruser enabled and easy package management.

Both of those are subjective, but I suspect either Gentoo or Debian
would fit well here.

| Is their a 686 debian cd set?

If you mean "PPro-optimised", then no.

| Please keep flames to yourself.

*sniff*

| Also I know I can get reviews off the net but I want personal and
| local opinions/experiances.

Okay.  My personal experience with Gentoo:

- All of the compilation took forever.  Really.  It also exposed some
  flakiness in my machine (which turned out to be a dodgy BIOS setting).
  If your computer is slightly suspect, installing Gentoo will
  probably uncover this.

- It didn't "feel" any faster than Debian, despite everything being
  optimised from the ground up for my machine (apparently).

- The package management wasn't quite as polished as apt+dpkg - it felt
  as though you had no idea what it was doing or whether you'd be able
  to restore your system to a working state (i.e. older packages) if
  anything broke.

- In my case, I used XFS as the installation guide then recommended; I
  was bitten by the problems described in the current installation
  guide.  (Not Gentoo's fault, but annoying nonetheless. For the record,
  I disagree with the statement that the problem is due to "improperly
  designed programs," but that's a rant for another occasion.)

- The last straw, for me, was when upgrading left me with a completely
  hosed KDE installation.  Rather than work out what had gone wrong and
  attempt to fix it, I installed Debian unstable instead.  IMHO much
  nicer :-)  I'm not claiming that running Debian unstable will leave
  you with a system which never breaks - quite the contrary, it will
  break from time to time, more or less by definition - but at least I
  felt that with Debian, the packaging system was somehow more
  deterministic, and I could poke around bugs.debian.org and the ML
  archives to find out what was going on.

Also: for those what like online message boards as a form of help (not
me! email lists are much nicer...): forums.gentoo.org is apparently a
good place to visit.

| A bit of info about the Gentoo installer would also be nice,

There is none! :-)  You get a live CD which drops you into a shell
prompt.  From there you run fdisk, mke2fs, mount your partitions, untar
a base system onto your new drive, then chroot into the new system and
download and install stuff.  After that's finished chugging away you set
up some config files (with your choice of nano or vi), download and
install Grub (or LILO), reboot, and pray! :-)

| hardware detection,

There is none! :-)

| preferred bootloader,

Grub.  Or LILO.  Both bootloaders are available in both Debian and
Gentoo, but I prefer Grub.

| speed.

| I would probably start with a precompiled stage 3.

Hmm.  I started from stage1; the initial bootstrap (to get to stage 3)
didn't take anywhere near as long as compiling things like XFree86, KDE,
Openoffice and other such big packages.

| p.s. This is a chance for Debian users to convince me to stay and Gentoo 
| users to try and persuade me to convert WITHOUT flaming ;)

I'm a Debian user and believe that Debian is probably your best option;
on the other hand I won't flame you if you choose Gentoo (unless you
install it and then proceed to complain about it - in which case I'll
say "told you so!").  

Cheers,

Cameron.

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