Gentoo right for me?

[Eis]

nice!

then i know what to do now.

see ya

[glurps]

Personally i would never use KDE/Gnome on gentoo, because i believe they destroy the thinking behind gentoo..... gentoo is designed to be sleak and lightweight meaning the computer will run at optimum performance, and installing KDE/Gnome adds lots of (usually) unnecesary stuff, lots of stuff that you will never use, and if you do, will only use a couple of times.

gentoo introduced split ebuilds to help out with that recently.http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/kde-spl...tyle=printable

i hope this is planed for gnome too. for some reason i have a strong dislike of kde. gnome seams fine eventhough everthing is too big but kde brrr. just dont like it. and suse i only used for two weeks probably because of the kde look (and because konqueror stopped working properly after a few days).

Not to steer you away from Fedora or anything, but there is a pre-built Gentoo distribution called VidaLinux

i intended to try out vidalinux some days ago but didnt like this:
http://desktop.vidalinux.com/index.p...d=16&Itemid=42

[starrbuck]

I think Fedora Core 3, SuSE Linux Professional 9.2, and Mandrake 10.1 are three of the best distros. I have installed them all at one time or another, in addition to trying some others. They all have nice setup programs and configuration utilities and I found no major bugs. Debian is also nice but has a text-only installer. Gentoo, in all honesty, was tough for me to install, and I am a software engineer by trade. It's a little too technical for me. I want something that looks nice and just works. I'm not concerned if a few cpu cycles go to supporting things I don't necessary need.

I echo the suggestion to use distrowatch.com and read about the different distros there before you make your decision. Good luck!

[Eis]

Hi, Leute.

I think I am going to move to the fedora forum then, but first some more questions which concern all of us.

How do I know how much swap to use?
I have 1 gig of ddr ram
128 of video memory (ati radeon)
and a centrino 1,6 cpu.

How can I find out, how much swap to use? I think the Mandrake installation didn't really help me with that decision... I read once that you should use twice as much swap, as your RAM is, but I think that's not valid in this case, is it?

so?

greets, eis

[dylunio]

I'd go for im between 1028MB of SWAP, and 2056MB of SWAP, it is up to you n the end, on my system I have 512RAM and 1000MB SWAP, and it works fine. The SWAP twice the size of your RAM is a rule of thumb thr doesn't need to be followed that closly.

dylunio

[sdousley]

dylunio, i have heard that as a rule of thumb, but often dont need more than 1gb of swap.

I am running a pc with 256MB DDR ram and 128MB DDR Video RAM (was 64 SD before upgrade) and i have rarely seen my computer use the swap space With 1GB of RAM, i can't see it using it much what so ever.

I dont see the whole more ram you have more swap you should have, swap is just an overrun for the memory, so surely the more physical memory you have, the LESS swap you need..... i know this is not the rule of thumb.... but why?!

[Eis]

Ok. I think it also makes sense, what sdousley sais!
At some point this rule of thumb just doesn't match anymore...

But isn't there anyone you KNOWS how to solve our little Problem here?

I would go with 1024 mb at 1 gig of ram...
gr, boris

[sdousley]

since posting last i mentioned what i said in my last post on the irc channel, and someone said that the rule of thumb was for older systems, which have nearer 32mb of RAM.

[eerok]

... someone said that the rule of thumb was for older systems, which have nearer 32mb of RAM.

I agree. I think anything more than ~500MB of swap is a waste no matter how much ram you have. Maybe even that much is overkill.

For example, I have 2GB ram and have never used my swap.

[Dapper Dan]

eerok is right. Unless you have a special need that requires an incredibly huge amount of memory, after 512MB RAM my opinion is you don't need a swap at all. In fact, every distro I've ever run on my Dell 4550 with 512 RAM, (and there have been many), runs faster without a swap. I still have one just in case, but I comment it out in /etc/fstab after installation, and there is always a noticable improvement in speed when I do.