Linux Benchmarking

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 12:55:42PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote

> For me that means debian with it's wonderful packagemangement and
> great package quality, and ready to use packages of almost any
> program I could want.

  Gentoo can make the same claim.  My standard "torture test" is to do a
basic console-only install of Gentoo.  Then tell it to install Gimp or
Gnumeric... and watch it pull in Xorg and its dependancies, plus all the
other base libs that Gimp or Gnumeric need.  It ends up building a
working TWM that will run the app.

  IMHO, Redhat 7.3 was probably the best end-user distro of its time.
When Redhat announced the impending end of support for 7.3, I switched
to Debian almost two years ago (Sept 2003).  After the Windows-like
upgrade treadmill of RH 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8, and 9, I actively sought
out a stable slowly-changing distro, and Debian had that reputation.

  I was happily using Debian for about a year when its "stability" bit
me.  The latest versions of Realplayer and Firefox refused to install
due to outdated gtk (and other) libs.  These versions fixed security
holes in previous versions, so running with the old version was not an
option.  I switched to CRUX linux (which assumes -march=i686 and -O2)
for a few months.  I was looking for more optimization, and people
suggested I try Gentoo... so here I am.

  My initial goal with Gentoo wasn't bragging rights on benchmarks, but
rather to extend the useful life of my 450 mhz PIII Dell which will soon
be celebrating its 6th anniversary.  Due to the recent demise of my P4,
the PIII has been pressed into temporary service as my main machine
until I purchase a new one.  It does 90%+ of apps OK.  However, it drops
frames on some internet TV sites under mplayer, and manipulating 2560 X
1920 images in Gimp happens at "a rather liesurely pace".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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