[ptx] computer hardware suggestions

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday 17 August 2005 01:16 pm, Brian Innes wrote:
snip

> Of course, Ubuntu (or any binary based distro) isn't anywhere near as
> optimised as sourcebased distros like Gentoo, however spending months
> compiling everything from source just to gain a few milliseconds isn't
> my cup of tea!
>
> Anyway, I'd recommend Ubuntu.

OK being a Gentoo user I have to respond.  GCC runs very fast on amd64 based 
systems.  I can recompile everything on my machine in about 8 hours.  And I 
do mean everything X.Org, KDE, kernel, apps.....  On modern fast machines the 
compiler over head is for the most part a non-issue.  A few years ago with 
much slower machines it was a major issue.  I do however agree that the fact 
that things may run ever so slightly faster is not the real driver behind my 
moving to Gentoo.  Nor should it be for anyone.

The real advantage is long term maintainability.  With a binary distro you get 
easy and fast installation of both the base system and apps.  What you loose 
is long term maintainability.  I was running SuSE for a while and while I 
liked it very much after a while it started to get dated as all that is 
released by SuSE is "security" updates for any given version. It is very 
difficult to migrate a SuSE 9.1 machine to SuSE 9.2 or 9.3.  In order to get 
the latest stuff it is generally recommended that you reinstall with a newer 
version of SuSE.  I am not sure if this is also true for Ubuntu.  

With Gentoo I can keep my system as up to date as I want without too much 
effort and without the need to ever reinstall.  In fact Gentoo recommends 
that users migrate rather than reinstall when new versions are released.  I 
have allready migrated from 2004.3 to 2005.0 and will soon migrate to 2005.1.  
The difference is that with a source based distro I will send a little more 
time on a regular basis keeping things up to date and with a binary distro it 
will be easier day to day but you will have to do major maintenance every 6 
months to a year to stay mostly up to date.  I should also point out that the 
initial installation of Gentoo is tedious and time consuming.

As much as I like Gentoo I would not recommend it to a new Linux user.  There 
is allready a significant learning curve in moving to Linux from Windows.  
Adding the additional learning curve that a source based distro requires 
makes that too much for a new user to handle.  Unless, of course, that user 
is has lots of Linux/Unix/BSD experience.   On the other hand those of you 
that have been running a binary distro for a while and feel like you know how 
things work should give Gentoo a shot.  You will learn a whole bunch more 
about Linux and you will be more in control of your computing environment.   
Even if you decide that you don't like it all the stuff you will learn will 
help no matter what distro you decide to run.

I should also add that I have had a very good experience running Linux on an 
amd64 machine.  Almost everything I am running is built as 64 bit code.  
There are only a few areas were 64 bit binaries are a problem (mostly media 
stuff and this is improving very quickly) and in those cases you can run 32 
bit code without difficulty.  For example, I have all of the Hugin stuff 
built as 64 bit code (Hugin, Nona, PTOptimizer, Enblend, mono, autopano-SIFT, 
libpano12) but I also have the 32 bit PTStitcher binaries along with a 32 bit 
version of libpano12 and I can select either stitcher from Hugin just like 
you would on a 32 bit machine.  But Nona simply blows the doors off of 
PTStitcher.   At things stand now Windows users with 64 machines will only be 
able to find a few 64 bit apps even if they have Windows 64 installed.

Hal