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

[Sham Chukoury]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 19:13, Cameron Patrick wrote:

<snip>

> 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...

True. Check out http://sorcerer.wox.org/docs/distro/


> 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.

I was tinkering with the Gentoo 1.4 livecd a while ago, and saw some
option which was said to be of some benefit to users on dialup. I didn't
pay much attention at the time since I'd just gotten on adsl and thought
"dial up? pfft.." ;P Anyways, I do believe that option was meant to
somehow change the behaviour of portage so that it would download a few
packages, or something like that, instead of downloading and building a 
whole stack of packages.
Maybe google for "portage dial up gentoo"


> 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.

Gentoo now has something called the GRP. More info: google for "gentoo
reference platform" There *is* a WAIX mirror for gentoo distfiles.
Get your gentoo CD images from ftp://mirror.wa.3fl.net/pub/gentoo
Check out ftp://ftp.megamirror.com/pub/gentoo/ and
ftp://ftp.megamirror.com/pub/gentoo-portage/ for your distfiles and
gentoo-related stuff on waix. (megamirror.com is listed on waix.bur.st)
There is a way to configure gentoo to use a specific mirror site instead
of the default one. Google and the Gentoo forums might be of help there.


> | 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 don't know why you'd want to install a debian package on a gentoo
system, but... afaik, it's possible. You have to 'inject' it into the
portage tree - basically just tell portage that the package is there.
(or else there's no way it's going to know, right?) This is quite
painful - I've tried it - I was trying to install portage over debian...
I gave up. :P

Personal opinion of gentoo:

Quite interesting. I didn't use it for very long - I only downloaded the
LiveCD to poke around it and see how it worked. Then I installed a base
system on a spare 2Gb hard disk. Installing things was as good as apt,
IMO. I'd tell it to install something and it would go and download
everything needed, building as it went along, seemingly grabbing
up-to-date packages. I quite liked it, but didn't have enough space to
make it a fully functional system (not much you can do with 2 gigs these
days!), nor the time to fully migrate data from one OS to another.

As for Debian, I've been using it (3.0r1) since some time last February
or March. I reckon it's mostly a nice distro, but... I guess I'm
outgrowing it - that's another story. Debian's pretty good if you're
looking for something quite solid and reliable. I wouldn't recommend
Debian if you want something that's closer to the 'bleeding edge' of
development out there.

§:)

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