Comments on: To Gentoo or not to Gentoo?

By: alexrio4

alexrio4 — Sun, 20 May 2012 09:24:37 +0000

Hi,
your explanation is actually aweasome.
It tried gentoo and recommened it when i used to rule with it.
After day and another day compiling gentoo packages one day someone talked to me about debian.

Gentoo good: strong
bad: 2 much time compiling (even long days doing it)

ps: ruby rulz, sql alone is nothing, it must be backgrounded.

That is why i debian’ize myself
So debian rulz! and gentoo for certainly kind of projects.

By: Jon Gerdes

Jon Gerdes — Sat, 15 May 2010 00:43:40 +0000

I have to disagree with the author on many points but basically it boils down to choice. I run many, many Linuxs of various flavours but my personal favourite is a penguin from the Falkland Islands.

If MySQL runs like shit for him on Gentoo then there is a reason why! As someone who writes books on the subject, I’d hope he’d have the knowledge to publish bug reports – I’m sure they’d be received well and we’d all benefit.

I don’t know if it is relavent but I use MySQL for mail logging via rsyslog. On one of my customer’s site they are the victim of rather a lot of attempts to relay. This means that rsyslog ends up doing an INSERT/UPDATE on a 20M record database several times per second. The box is a small Dell system with RAID 1 and 2Gb RAM. It does not even sweat over this. I accept that I’m not a proper DBA but this is pretty impressive to me.

Mind you what is really impressive is Exim dealing with it – it has to spawn kids for each connection and do the various DNS look ups before rsyslog gets into the logging. … and there are quite a few connections!

By: alex

alex — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:58:16 +0000

i completely agree with the author.

gentoo takes just too much time to maintain and keep up-to-date, especially if you have other things to do. i’m using linux for software development and simply can’t afford to waste hours updating/fixing the system every week.

if something breaks and you need to reinstall everything from scratch, that might take hours if not days – now imagine you have something urgent to do…

alex

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:08:52 +0000

When I started looking around for other distro’s I ran across archlinux (http://archlinux.com). The major selling points for me is its package management application (called Pacman). This little app allows me to start from scratch and configure a new box in a 1/2 hour or less. I can ensure that all my boxes are the same.

Upgrading is a breeze. The system is optimized for !686 hardware and will not run on anything older than a Pentium III – but that’s fine for my needs.

If you looking for a new disto, you should check this one out.

Chris….

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:17:49 +0000

Andrei, well spoken, and thanks very much for your thoughts. I have actually come around to something like this point of view since writing this article. Once I began to think of Gentoo as a meta-distribution, many of the things I mentioned began to make sense. I still don't use it myself, because -- not surprisingly -- I don't want to maintain my own distribution! That comes back to the "I don't want to solve the problems a distribution solves" point of my article.

I am planning to benchmark MySQL so I can figure out how to properly compile it. All I need to do is set up a non-production machine for that.