My first post out of Gentoo

[hazel]

It took me a long time to get here. I've had dillo up and running for some time but I couldn't log on with it. Now since last night I have firefox. I'm using a ROX desktop but there's not a lot on it yet - just a terminal, an editor, xclock, some folders, dillo and firefox.

What I like:
1) The clever use of colour in virtual consoles - different colour prompts for root and users, colour appearing in emerge when a program is finally installed so you can see it out of the corner of your eye and come over to the terminal to see what downloads next. Ok, the prompts I could colorise myself but it's nice to have them by default.

2) Emerge is hypnotic, quite addictive. And there are useful messages associated with some programs telling you if you have to run something else or edit something to complete the installation.

3) The feeling that I've done it myself, not had it all preconstructed for me.

What I don't like:
1) You update something and something else breaks. That never happened to me before. I updated python and then I couldn't log in because ROX wouldn't come up. It's written in python and couldn't find the libraries it needed. Re-emerging gtk solved that one.

2) Installing things is slo-o-o-ow. Increasingly I'm having to do it overnight.

3) I thought something like firefox would be quicker than in Debian because it was compiled specially for me but it isn't. If anything, it's slower.

Still, I've learned a few things and so far I've solved all the howto-type problems by myself (thank you, google!)

[reed9]

Congratulations! I've thought about taking Gentoo for a spin someday, but I can't decide if it's worth the time investment. It seems similar in a lot of ways to the distro-of-my-heart Arch Linux, but with more hassle.

[darkrose0510]

firefox, go to "about:config" search for "pipe" change the 3 false values to true, and change the maxrequests to something like 30. Right click, create new integer called "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" set value to 0.

Restart firefox and marvel at the speed.

[elija]

Holy Cow!

That works in Mint too and yeah it feels faster

[glaston]

Hazel!
Excellent!!
That's quite an accomplishment.
I haven't tried Gentoo yet at all.

I bet it feels great to pull that off, no?
The way you make comments out of the blue about not being able to learn things, I wouldn't have guessed you'd go this route.
Next thing you'll be patching apps up and writing your own.
Way to go!

This inspires me to try it.

[elija]

Next thing you'll be patching apps up and writing your own.

She already has written her own app (http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/cof...e-program.html)

Considering she is "just a little old lady" I wonder what she would do if she was a geek!

[oz]

2) Installing things is slo-o-o-ow. Increasingly I'm having to do it overnight.

I've successfully installed Gentoo a number of times in the past but for the reason you mention above, I've never been able to stick with it for very long. I'm glad it's out there for those people that have the spare time needed to deal with it, though.

Hope you can get over any bumps and have fun with it!

[gruven]

Compiling things isn't really that slow, it just depends on your machine.

I can recompile my whole system (emerge @system) in less than 8 hours, and I use KDE.

I think xulrunner (the libs for firefox) takes me about 15 minutes maybe to compile.

If you have more than one machine with the same architecture you should probably look into distcc. Also, you can use ccache to speed up recompiles.

I use Fedora also on some of my machines, and sometimes updating my Gentoo desktop takes less time than my Fedora machines.

Also, updating won't take as long if you do it every day. There are a lot less updates doing it daily, and you won't have to worry about as much breakage as opposed to updating once every two weeks.

Gentoo requires quite a bit of attention, and teaches you a lot. But when you get it working, it tends to just work with regular maintenance.

I haven't used the stable tree in forever though, and on my machines I use the "Funtoo" variant. IMO it is more stable and I have less problems with it than I do with Gentoo ~amd64.

Anyway, congratulations on getting this far with Gentoo. You will learn a lot and hopefully be able to teach others with your knowledge. You will love rc-update and eselect, and I have come to rely on the gentoolkit because of tools like equery.

[hazel]

firefox, go to "about:config" search for "pipe" change the 3 false values to true, and change the maxrequests to something like 30. Right click, create new integer called "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" set value to 0.

Restart firefox and marvel at the speed.

I'm in Debian right now so I tried it on Iceweasel and it certainly improves things. I'll do it with Firefox too.

Updating every day! That does sound geeky!

[cousinlucky]

Hazel when I saw this thread this morning I made a commitment to celebrate your achievement!

Here's to you Hazel, I toast you with a Stewart's Root Beer. I am very happy for you!!